Vivid theories, shame about the facts

On Newsroom SouthEast on BBC1 last night, the magazine for local issues had a piece on a J M W Turner museum opening in Thanet (an area, I learnt, he somewhat surprisingly described as having the best sunsets in all of Europe). But then it came to a ‘Turner expert’ (I wonder how that pays its way). He ventured to explain the reason for Turner’s vivid sunsets – “I have a theory, that as it was the start of the Industrial Revolution, he [Turner] was looking towards London and painting the pollution over it.”
Poppycock!
In 1815, in the archipelago that now encompasses Indonesia, an island called Tambora exploded. It was the most powerful volcanic eruption in the last ten thousand years. To put it into context, it shifted seven times more ash into the atmosphere than Krakatoa (which itself produced striking dusks itself all over the world) in 1883 and 150 times more than Mount St Helens in 1980. The thin level of soot in the air lowered global temperatures by two degrees Celsius as the sun was partially blocked out. Fred Pearce in New Scientist corroborates that this cataclysmic event was the reason that provided Turner with such rich backgrounds to paint. Some ‘Turner expert’ Newsroom SouthEast unearthed.