Turner - The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October 1834

J.M.W.Turner, The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October 1834, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art

This is one of two depictions in oil of the same event that Turner painted – the other is in The Cleveland Museum of Art – but I have chosen this one, now housed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to write about. Both are great works, but I prefer this version for the sense of immediacy in its composition. It is a painting of high drama and elemental energy.

On the 16^th October 1834, a fire broke out inside The Palace of Westminster, the onetime royal residence, parts of which dated back to the eleventh century, and which had become the permanent home of Parliament in 1295. Although the magnificent Westminster Hall was saved, large parts of the medieval complex were destroyed and necessitated a major re-design and re-build. The Gothic Revival style estate created by Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin that is so familiar to us today was the result.

The fire was a calamity. The closest contemporary equivalent in terms of its magnitude as a disaster, so devastating in the loss of buildings of such historical significance, was the shocking and nightmarish conflagration at the Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral in 2019, watched with dismay by millions of us on our TV screens as a small fire developed in front of our eyes to become such an enormous one.

Viewed from an elevated position on what would later become The Albert Embankment on the south side of the river Thames and just immediately west of Westminster bridge, the burning Parliament buildings in this painting blaze with an almost too-intense-to-look at ferocity and while the left side of the picture portrays an uncontrollable inferno, the white stone of the bridge on the right side appears ghostly, like an apparition from a lost civilisation. At the foot of the painting, we see a multitude that has gathered in mute wonderment to witness the terrible event and in the middle ground, people have also boarded boats for a closer look from the middle of the river. You can almost feel the heat on their faces as they inch a little too closely.

One reading of the painting is to see in it an expression of the sublime, not in the modern adjectival sense as a synonym for magnificent or splendid, but in the philosophical sense as defined by Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century: the experience of something overwhelming and terrifying. To term something as sublime was to highlight its terrible beauty, its stupefying might, and humanity’s puny insignificance in the face of its forces (I would have used the word ‘awesome’ here were it not so debased that I heard it used as a response today when I said yes to the question ‘would you like fries with that?’).  I think Turner is excited by the elemental violence of the fire, just as he was in the face of wild storms at sea, or blizzards in the mountains. Here it is as if the sky itself has been set on fire as the flames gobble the very oxygen in the air. We might be at the impact flash of a comet striking the earth, as the heat and the roiling, all-consuming flames vaporise man’s constructs into nothingness. It is a darkly thrilling phenomenon, this unleashing of uncontrollable promethean power and annihilation.

The painting was made when political instability was prevalent in Europe, and another way to look at it is as an expressive allegory of the ideological turbulence in the period. Memories of the French Revolution had not all faded, and the blood-letting excesses of The Terror took place little more than a generation beforehand. Soon after this, bloody wars were triggered by Napoleon’s ambitions for continental dominance. Even more recently, there had been uprisings in Belgium, Poland and in regions of what is now Italy and Germany as well as a new one just over the channel in France. This widespread upheaval was the cause of both reactionary anxiety at home and, in some radical quarters, dissatisfaction with the prevailing constitutional establishment. In Britain, The Great Reform Act of 1832, a bill enacted by Parliament that extended the electorate and abolished the gross inequity of ‘rotten boroughs’, was specifically seen as a measure (or a palliative half-measure) that would quell any threat of insurrection. As a politically liberal, reformist-minded and anti-authoritarian artist, the symbolism of the sight of the fiery destruction of the houses of Lords and Commons was not lost on Turner. His sympathies lay with the crowds watching the inferno rather than with the MPs and Peers dislodged by it. At the time the painting was made, the cause of the fire hadn’t yet been established, and the possibility remained that arson was to blame. Could the artist have found himself animated by this prospect too?

There is a journalistic aspect to this work, a sense that Turner was an eyewitness to a calamitous, even a mythic event and that his artistic abilities uniquely qualified him to make an accurate visual report of it. Large fires are the stuff of legend, particularly so in London. The Great Fire of 1666, so the folklore had it, cleansed the city of plague. We now know this to be untrue and that the disease had started to subside anyway, but the idea of fire as a purifier as well as a destroyer was lodged firmly in the public imagination at the time. That fire swept away many of the city’s timber buildings and enabled its rebuilding in stone so that its sense of itself, its identity as a locus of solidity, might and power was forged through the wholesale destruction of the structures of the past. The Great Fire came to be seen as a necessary event, a precursor to the capital’s phoenix-like rebirth as a mightier metropolis, an ordered infrastructural engine that created a global trading empire. Turner must have felt himself privileged to behold and then depict such a similarly consequential occasion.

We should also remember that fire was not fully scientifically understood until the late eighteenth century when the great French chemist Lavoisier put forward his ‘Oxygen Theory of Combustion’. Turner attended lectures given by Britain’s leading scientists at The Royal Institution and understood how in essence, application of the recently discovered laws of thermodynamics were helping to power the Industrial Revolution. Fire was an ‘element’ from which smoke, soot and steam would combine in the atmosphere to create startling effects which fascinated him and which he depicted with such feeling. But in this painting, he responds to the hair-raising sensation of uncontained conflagration. Progressive men of the age might have learned how to harness energy to serve society’s needs through technological innovation but sometimes the genie escapes the bottle to remind them of nature’s physical capacity for ungovernable blind fury.

Although never professing himself to be an orthodox Christian (scholars have described his spiritual beliefs as more pantheistic), any depiction of fire by someone raised as Turner was under the influence of its narratives, its morals and its codes of behaviour would doubtless see in it a reflection of hell on earth. The Gehenna that Jesus references in the New Testament is the fiery hell metaphor for utter ruin while The Lake of Fire in the book of Revelation would surely not appear too dissimilar to the Thames in this painting where the fire’s reflections on its surface make it seem to be itself ablaze. The ‘unquenchable fire’ or a ‘furnace of fire’ where there will be a ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth’ as the terrible destination of the damned was an idea that would be fixed in the nineteenth century imagination. If William Blake gave all this hellfire a sulphurously apocalyptic expression in his earlier art and poetry, Turner, always much more of an empiricist observer of atmospheric phenomena (and a proto impressionist to boot), would nevertheless have seen in its Westminster outbreak a symbolic kind of reckoning for the institutional malfeasance of the ruling classes.