Volcano School


The Volcano School refers to a group of non-native Hawaiian artists who painted dramatic nocturnal scenes of Hawaii's erupting volcanoes. Some of the artists also produced watercolors, which, by the nature of the medium, tended to be diurnal. At their best, these paintings exemplify a fusion of the European Sublime aesthetic, Romantic landscapes, and the American landscape traditions. Two volcanoes on the Island of Hawaii, Kilauea and Mauna Loa, were intermittently active during the 1880s and 1890s, when interest in Volcano School paintings peaked. Getting to Kilauea, the more frequently painted volcano required an arduous two- or three-day roundtrip journey on horseback.
Printmaker and art educator Huc-Mazelet Luquiens called this period "a little Hawaiian renaissance".

Members

was arguably the most important Volcano School painter. Other artists include Ernst William Christmas, Constance Fredericka Gordon Cumming, Charles Furneaux, D. Howard Hitchcock, Ogura Yonesuke Itoh, Ambrose McCarthy Patterson, Titian Ramsey Peale, Louis Pohl, Eduardo Lefebvre Scovell, William Pinkney Toler, William Twigg-Smith, Joseph Dwight Strong and Lionel Walden.
A selection of Volcano School paintings is usually on display at the Honolulu Museum of Art.

Related work

Although the American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church produced similar paintings of Ecuador’s Cotopaxi Volcano during and after visits in 1853 and 1857, he is not considered a member of this group and he never visited the Hawaiian Islands.

Selected works

Footnotes