A soft and beautiful drawing of distant, unimaginable destruction. Eduard Moritz Pechuël-Loesche was a naturalist in Hereroland (now Namibia) when he painted this watercolor in late 1884, one of a series he did across Africa, Germany, and the Atlantic that were published in the book Untersuchungen uber Dämmerungserscheinungen zur Erklarung der nach dem Krakatau-ausbruch beobachteten atmospharisch-optischen Storung, or “”Studies on twilight phenomena: to explain the atmospheric-optical disturbance observed after the Krakatau eruption” by the German physicist Johann Kiessling,
The volcanic explosion in Krakatoa in 1883, the previous year, affected the atmosphere in unusual ways around the globe. Kiessling was able to replicate some of the effects from Pechuël-Loesche’s illustrations in the lab, using dust, water vapor, and flakes of ash.
You can find the whole series at Google Arts and Culture or at the Royal Society.