Nature Unleashed: Hamburg museum shows natural disasters in art

Jan Asselijn's (1610-1652) oil on canvas painting The Breach of the Saint Anthony's Dike near Amsterdam focuses on the disastrous storm tide that struck the Dutch coast in March 1651. The ocean's onslaught broke St. Anthony's Dike near Amsterdam. Note the two figures in the foreground shrinking back from the gushing water and the raging wind.

The above painting captures the scene after a gunpowder store in the Dutch city of Delft exploded, completely destroying a quarter of the city and killing thousands of people. The event was known as the "The Delft Thunderclap." Craters, burnt trees and roofless houses can be seen in Van der Poel's painting. The artist completed 20 canvases of the disaster, always from the same perspective.

Traveling in Italy in November 1774, British artist Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797) witnessed an eruption of the Mount Vesuvius near the city of Naples. The event captured his fascination, and he created about 30 paintings documenting volcanic eruptions over the next 20 years.

French landscape painter Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819) was also fascinated by Mount Vesuvius. He painted the volcano's historic eruption in the year 79 A.D. In the foreground, two figures support a dying man, the Roman officer and naturalist Pliny the Elder. The collapsing buildings and billowing smoke with the still raging volcano in the background create an apocalyptic scene.

From 1820 to 1821, German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) experienced a harsh winter on the Elbe River, where he witnessed floes — large sheets of floating ice. He made several drawings of the rare natural phenomenon. The Sea of Ice is the foremost work from that series. The ice floes are so monumental that the shipwreck on the right is not immediately noticeable.

The above late work, also by Caspar David Friedrich, is entitled Neubrandenburg in Flames and shows a city burning, with smoke billowing from the church. Friedrich is perhaps referring to Neubrandenburg city fires that took place before his time, in 1631,1676 and 1737.

Another fire: Jacob Gensler's (1808-1845) "Hamburg after the Fire of 1842" is regarded as a key artwork depicting the devastating fire in the northern German port city. Ruins and smoke dominate in the background, as men in the foreground are already at work rebuilding the city.

The emigrant ship Austria sank in the Atlantic after a fire broke out on its passage from Hamburg to New York. Only 89 of 545 passengers survived the disaster. German-Austrian artist Johann Carl Berthold Püttner (1821-1881) portrayed the catastrophe in his painting made the same year.

Many years after the maritime disaster, French artist Eugene Isabey (1803-1886) chose a huge canvas (2 x 3.4 meters; 6.5 by 11 feet) to paint the 1823 sinking of a three-master. The sailors can barely stay above the waves in the raging storm that also makes it impossible to lower the lifeboats. The interplay between massive dark waves and angry black clouds is one of the painting's key elements.

Floods are just as disastrous today as they were centuries ago. German multimedia artist Kota Ezawa's (born 1969) computer-animated work 'Flood, 2011' is based on a newspaper photograph of flooding in Georgia, USA. He uses vector graphics, computer-graphic images defined in terms of 2D points, to create a technical picture.

The above work by Portuguese-born visual artist Olphaert den Otter (born 1955) is part of his World Stress Painting series that highlights the daily glut of photos from disaster areas in the media. The artist, who lives in the Netherlands, keeps on adding to his "never-ending series" which he refers to as a "catalogue of beauty without well-being."