William Ascroft

William Ascroft (1832–1914) was a late 19th century British landscape painter best known for his colour sketches commissioned by the Royal Academy of Arts of sunsets over Chelsea in England in the years after the 1883 explosion of the Krakatoa volcano, recording details otherwise unavailable before the invention of colour photography. Ascroft was known to sketch the sky at sunset regularly, and made a total of more than 500 works detailing the red skies post-eruption.