J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

This watercolour study was originally one of nine consecutive leaves (D27846–D27854; Turner Bequest CCLXXXIII 1–9) in a sketchbook. They have previously been documented with varying degrees of certainty as showing the 1834 fire at the Houses of Parliament beside the River Thames in central London, but are here identified as representing the similarly large and dramatic fire which broke out at the moated Tower of London on 30 October 1841, destroying the late seventeenth-century Grand Storehouse (see the Introduction to the sketchbook for detailed discussion).

Conflagration of the Tower of London, on the Night of the 30^th of October 1841, a colour lithograph published on 3 November of a view ‘drawn upon the spot by William Oliver’ (1804–1853) shows the Tower complex from the north, with flames and smoke pouring from the windows and rafters of the Grand Storehouse, largely obscuring the White Tower. This can be compared with the present work, the most precisely detailed of Turner’s studies in terms of architectural features. (See the Introduction for other comparisons between Turner’s studies and contemporary prints.) The pale blue form towards the left is presumably intended as the White Tower; otherwise lacking in detail, the inner faces of its corner turrets are shown receding in steep perspective, although in fact the north-west turret is cylindrical. Turner has included details of rafters, a pediment and what seems to be the clock tower of the Grand Storehouse (which fell in at quite an early stage of the fire), but it is not clear whether he intended to show the scene directly from the north, aligned directly on the façade of the storehouse, or obliquely from the north-east, which would explain the relative positions of the clock tower and the White Tower.

In addition to the newspaper stories extensively quoted in the sketchbook’s Introduction, the following details from the Times relate to the raising of the alarm late on the evening of Saturday 30 October:

The present Tower study is notable in being the only one of the nine to incorporate gouache: a touch of white is combined with scratching out to render a bright light through a window of the towers silhouetted towards the left. This may be an effect Turner observed or imagined, or perhaps the report caught his attention.

Addressing the sequence of studies in the context of the traditional former 1834 identification, Katherine Solender felt that only this and D27850, D27853 and D27854 included ‘shapes that can be remotely identified with the Parliamentary complex’, in this case possibly indicating the roof and lantern of Westminster Hall on the right, with the Towers of Westminster Abbey beyond to the left.2 In his extended catalogue entry for Turner’s painting The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons, 16th October, 1834, exhibited at the British Institution in 1835 (Philadelphia Museum of Art),3 Richard Dorment presented a sustained interpretation of the this and the other eight watercolour studies in terms of a sequence reflecting the topography and chronology of the 1834 Westminster fire.4

Technical notes:

There is a little scratching out towards the left, as discussed above. There is extensive watercolour offsetting on the verso (D40154), transferred from Tate D27848 (Turner Bequest CCLXXXIII 3).