Joseph Mallord William Turner Fire at the Grand Storehouse of the Tower of London 1841
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Fire at the Grand Storehouse of the Tower of London 1841
D27849
Turner Bequest CCLXXXIII 4
Turner Bequest CCLXXXIII 4
Watercolour on white wove paper, 235 x 325 mm
Inscribed in red ink by John Ruskin ‘4’ top right, upside down
Stamped in black ‘CCLXXXIII – 4’ bottom right
Inscribed in pencil ‘6’ bottom left
Inscribed in red ink by John Ruskin ‘4’ top right, upside down
Stamped in black ‘CCLXXXIII – 4’ bottom right
Inscribed in pencil ‘6’ bottom left
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Exhibition history
1974
Turner 1775–1851, Royal Academy, London, November 1974–March 1975 (458, as ‘The Burning of the Houses of Parliament’, 1834).
1978
¿¿¿¿¿¿, Shipka Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria, April–?May 1978, Belgrade, Serbia [former Yugoslavia], May 1978, Muzeul de Arte al RS [Republica Socialista] Romania, Bucharest, June–July 1978 (53, as a Houses of Parliament subject, 1834).
1998
Moonlight and Firelight: Watercolours from the Turner Bequest, Tate Gallery, London, July–November 1998 (no catalogue).
2004
Turner Whistler Monet, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, June–September 2004, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, October2004–January 2005, Tate Britain, London, February–May 2005 (not in catalogue, shown in London only).
2007
J.M.W. Turner, National Gallery of Art, Washington, October 2007–January 2008, Dallas Museum of Art, February–May 2008, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, June–September 2008 (122, as ‘The Burning of the Houses of Parliament’, 1834, reproduced in colour).
2013
Turner: Works on Paper, Tate Britain, London, April 2013–[ongoing March 2014] (no catalogue, as ‘The Burning of the Houses of Parliament’, 1834).
References
1834
A.J. Finberg, A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest, London 1909, vol.II, p.909, CCLXXXIII 4 (as ‘Do. do. do.’, i.e. ditto, Burning of the Houses of Parliament, from the river, as for D27846 (Turner Bequest CCLXXXIII 1) 1834).
1974
Martin Butlin, Andrew Wilton and John Gage, Turner 1775–1851, exhibition catalogue, Royal Academy, London 1974, p.129 no.458, as ‘The Burning of the Houses of Parliament’ 1834.
1975
Gerald Wilkinson, Turner’s Colour Sketches 1820–34, London 1975, reproduced in colour, p.78, as a Houses of Parliament subject 1834.
1978
Timothy Clifford, ¿¿¿¿¿¿, exhibition catalogue, Shipka Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria 1978, p.[24] no.53 (as a Houses of Parliament subject 1834).
1980
Turner’s England: Twelve Watercolours, London 1980, p.[22], reproduced in colour, p.[23], as ‘The burning of the Houses of Parliament’ 1834.
1984
Katherine Solender, Dreadful Fire! Burning of the Houses of Parliament, exhibition catalogue, Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio 1984, p.50, fig.41 (as ‘Burning of the Houses of Parliament’. c.1834).
1986
Richard Dorment, British Painting in the Philadelphia Museum: From the Seventeenth through the Nineteenth Century, Philadelphia 1986, pp.400, 401, 405 under no.4, fig.III.7, as a Parliament study 1834.
2007
Sarah Taft, in Ian Warrell (ed.), Franklin Kelly and others, J.M.W. Turner, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Art, Washington 2007, p.176 no.122, as ‘The Burning of the Houses of Parliament’ 1834, reproduced in colour, p.177.
2010
Tony Smibert in Nicola Moorby and Ian Warrell (eds.), How to Paint like Turner, London 2010, p.78, as ‘The Burning of the Houses of Parliament’ 1834, reproduced in colour.
2012
Leo Costello, J.M.W. Turner and the Subject of History, Farnham 2012, fig.2.18 (as ‘The Burning of the Houses of Parliament’ 1834).
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). Here there appears to be no indication of the White Tower, directly south of the storehouse, and it is presumably lost to view in the flames and smoke.
Addressing the sequence of studies in the context of the traditional former 1834 identification, Katherine Solender felt that the ‘fluid colours’ of this work, D27848 and D27852 ‘suggest burning architectural forms within an atmospheric setting, but these cannot be related to the fire at Westminster with any certainty’.1 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),2 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.3
The artist Tony Smibert (born 1949) has used this work as the basis of a free copy exercise to explore and demonstrate Turner’s watercolour techniques.4
How to cite
Matthew Imms, ‘Fire at the Grand Storehouse of the Tower of London 1841 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, April 2014, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, September 2014, https://www