Date: 15-10-2000
Owning Institution: Tate Britain, London
Publication:     Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”  
Subject:   19th Century    

On the evening of 16 October 1834 the Houses of Parliament caught fire. Large crowds gathered by the Thames as flames engulfed and then destroyed the seat of British government. The correspondent for the Gentleman’s Magazine gave an eyewitness account: “The solid walls, presenting numerous architectural apertures, appeared to glow as if red hot with fervent heat. To complete the terrors of the scene must be added the ‘dire yell’ when, as Shakespeare says, ‘by night and negligence the fire is spied in populous cities’, – the bells of St Margaret’s tolling – the firemen shouting – the crash of falling timbers – the drums of the footguards beating to arms, and the clarions of the horse guards wailing through the air.” At half past nine the roof of the House of Lords fell in. “Bright coruscations, as of electric fire, played in the great volume of flames, and so struck were the bystanders with the grandeur of the sight that they involuntarily (and from no bad feeling) clapped their hands as though they had been present at the closing scene of some dramatic spectacle.”

One bystander was J.M.W. Turner, who created numerous pencil sketches of the event together with nine exquisitely delicate and intensely fiery watercolours, one of which is reproduced here. Some art historians think it depicts the moment when the roof of the House of Lords collapsed. Others believe it represents a later incident, when London’s brand new water-borne firepump – which had run aground that evening thanks to the combination of a dry autumn and an unusually low tide – made its belated appearance at the scene. The pump’s effect was said to have been “prodigious”, causing great clouds of smoke to swirl from the blazing buildings up into the livid night sky. But the style of the picture means that it is impossible to link it with certainty to any particular incident. Turner’s contemporary and biographer Walter Thornbury noted that he “would melt up a day’s study into a sketch … in order to focus all the features of one impression”, which probably gets closer to the truth than any more literal interpretation.

Themes of catastrophe and destruction had long preoccupied the artist. In the past he had drawn on history or the Old Testament for inspiration when painting such subjects. Now he could actually witness a scene of cataclysm as thrilling as any he had imagined. We know that he stayed up all night watching the fire thanks to the diary of a student at the Royal Academy who managed (typical student) to sleep through the whole thing. John Green Waller asked his friends all about it. “The appearance of Westminster Abbey lighted up by the flames, they say, was most splendid. Some of the students who were on the river were in the same boat with Turner. Indeed it must have been a magnificent study for them.” Poor old sleepyhead. Talk about missing the boat.

Knowing that Turner was on the water makes sense of his low viewpoint, with the burning buildings above him and their reflection spreading out almost to his feet. It may also explain the sense of unsteadiness, verging on precariousness, conveyed by the image. The artist’s identification with the phenomenon he records is built into his picture’s very composition. He has entered as far into the blazing vortex as he dare.

But Turner is not at all certain to have done this picture on the spot. He himself said that working in colour, out of doors, was too slow and laborious. Nature moved too fast. Most of his studies from life were done in pencil in a visual shorthand which he would work up later back in his studio. Those who believe that the Houses of Parliament watercolours are exceptions to the rule point to the fact that the back of the page facing each of the images in the original sketchbook was blotted. This proves that Turner worked on them in a hurry, turning over each page while it was wet to start on the next. But it does not prove that he did them devant le motif. Artists often work quickly in their studios, after all. There can be plenty of excitement in painting from memory, trying to depict or distill what the mind’s eye sees.

The tremendous tonal subtlety of this watercolour would hardly have been easy to achieve in a boat at night under the irregular glare of burning buildings. There are other hints too that it is a product of memory and imagination, rather than pure observation. The Houses of Parliament were not classical in design, yet Turner has made their angry red silhouette resemble that of some pillared and pedimented temple. He was forever seeing analogies between his own time and the classical past, so this may have been his way of invoking comparisons with the burning of ancient Rome.

The destruction of the Houses of Parliament struck many of those who witnessed it as a highly symbolic event. The Reform Bill had been passed just two years earlier, putting an end to some of the most blatant forms of corruption in the electoral system and inaugurating a new era in British politics. Doubtless that made the subject all the more attractive to Turner, but I think the essence of its appeal was more profound and personal. He was fascinated by the fire because it seemed to embody his own deepest ideas – his conviction that the universe is forever being consumed in a process of change, and his corresponding belief that the everchanging fluctuations of light and darkness are the truest subject for an artist’s contemplation.

It had been the conventional function of light in painting to model form – to reveal what things look like. Turner daringly reversed that, making it the duty of things, instead, to show us what light looks like. This incidentally is why Impressionism (as the Impressionists themselves acknowledged) should truly be considered School of Turner. Every subsequent painter has had to reckon with his innovations. It was the beautiful catastrophe of October 16 that finally released Turner into the lucid and iconoclastic splendour of his late style. Painting the fire, he was also depicting his own destiny – to destroy and renew the traditions of Western art.