The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, October 16, 1834oil on canvas (1834-1835) by Joseph Mallord William Turner (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
English poetry is rife with metaphors concerning fire, if for the chief reason that language makes fire safe while adding dimension to its fascination. It is redundant to remind ourselves that the ancients considered fire one of four crucial elements but also useful. Fire is the great destroyer but also a great preserver in winter. Modern Hindu temples still maintain a corner in the southeast for Agni, a Vedic deity of fire. Even the sight of fire is magical, as most of us can remember from our childhood memories of gazing long into a campfire at night.
Less common, at least in Western culture, are visual and artistic depictions of fire. As the blazes in Southern California rage—in Pacific Palisades, Eaton, Santa Monica, Ventura County, et al—we can be certain our news cycle will be introduced to other major fire outbreaks by the end of our new year. There will be no dearth of opportunities to consider fire anew, but we can travel through art history to ask what those before us had in mind when confronted with its awesome powers of destruction.
What is most striking about fire in western art, on first glance, is how seldom it is portrayed. Italian artist Paolo Uccello gave western civilization one of its first portraits of natural destruction with his huge 1447 fresco, The Flood, which adorns the Santa Maria Novella basilica in Florence. Appropriately, it has a brown grimness that reminds us of all the lingering mud that endures once the flood waters are gone. It also seems to match the grim mood of God, who reminds us in Genesis that withholding his wrath in the form of fire was the surest sign of his mercy.
Only in artistic depictions of hell does fire get pride of place, most prominently in the right-hand panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s awesome 1504 triptych, Garden of Earthly Delights. Every act of painting is a balance of darkness and light but it is not until the 1834 fire that takes down London’s Houses of Parliament that fire gets its full due as a vision not just of raging, directionless destruction but something also approaching a vision impossible to discern.
There to capture this event, the most significant London fire between the Great Fire of 1666—thought to give shrift to warnings of the anti-Christ—and the WWII bombing blitz, was the great artist J.M.W. Turner. Somehow he had managed to get himself on a boat drifting in the Thames possibly before, but probably after, flames erupted in the Houses of Parliament. He tossed off a few rough sketches for the sight to take hold in his memory but waited months before attempting to commit the whole sight to a medium-sized oil on canvas, completed in 1835. Take a trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and you can see the result first-hand for yourself. Turner’s The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, October 16, 1834 is a painting of fire, almost itself on fire. Raging from the top-left corner, Turner’s ascending flames ignite a sense of awe that makes the work throb with wonder and disaster. You could call it a portrait of beautiful, collective panic, full as it is at the bottom with a throng of spectators unfamiliar with the sight of something so alive with imminent danger. Even the bridge over the Thames becomes severely diminished the further the eye travels toward this all-consuming blaze. Once out, and without the scourge of social media to politicize the destruction of their national landmark, authorities set about locating the fire’s exact cause: the burning of old, leftover tally sticks used by state treasurers to count votes, combined with faulty furnace flues.
Apropos of most things Turner, and true to his taciturn nature, there is no known report of England’s most famous painter saying much at all about his work once finished, displayed, and hung away for posterity. He might have been chuffed with confidence that his vision of such great destruction would rise above everyone else’s, including that of his most famous competition. John Constable tossed off a sketch of the same fire from the door of a hansom cab riding along Westminster Bridge, but Constable’s talent was clearly more in line with idyllic rural scenes, a la The Hay Wain (1821).
Whether focussed on the horror of a sinking slave ship or the signaling end of British naval power, Turner had a knack for synching color, dimension, and figurative outline to the key of his imaginative eye, the very sights of what he saw and inside himself. Or, as nineteenth-century art historian Daniel Robert Koch tells us in the ominously titled 1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die: “The final result is an embodiment of the Romantic sublime: the terror of fire and the radiant beauty of its light combine, putting the viewer into contact with the infinite forces of nature. … This makes the painting as dynamic to viewers today as it was nearly two hundred years ago.”
This is no comfort to the thousands of Angelinos who have fled and are still fleeing the massive destruction visited upon them. What Turner’s remarkable painting of that long-ago night in London reminds us, though, is that fire’s wrath is not ours to contain, but it is ours to give homage to, whether framed or not.
