National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Turner to Monet: the triumph of landscape

… this amazing mountain continues to exhibit such various scenes of sublimity and beauty at exactly the distance one would chuse to observe it from; a distance which almost admits examination, and certainly excludes immediate fear … columns of flame, high as the mountain’s self, shoot from its crater into the clear atmosphere with a loud and violent noise … a thick cloud, charged heavily with electric matter, passing over, met the fiery explosion … Hester Thrale, 17891 Mount Vesuvius was especially active in the late eighteenth and for most of the nineteenth century.2This fact, along with a growing awareness of the natural sciences in this period, meant the volcano attracted a great deal of interest. Indeed images of Vesuvius in various states of activity, as well as other scenes of uncontrollable nature – avalanches, storms, fires – became synonymous with the Sublime and with Romantic art. In the 1770s the English artist Joseph Wright of Derby, Frenchman Pierre-Jacques Volaire and German Jacob Philipp Hack