Vesuvius in Eruption

J. M. W. Turner
watercolour, c. 1817-20
Yale Center for British Art

Italian Landscape with a Tower

J. M. W. Turner
oil on canvas, c. 1825-30
Tate

Burning of the Houses of Parliament, 1834

The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16 October 1834, 1835
The Cleveland Museum of Art

The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, October 16, 1834, 1834-35
The Philadelphia Museum of Art

On this date in 1834 the Old Palace of Westminster, for centuries the meeting place of the British Parliament, was destroyed in a catastrophic fire. The event is well-known to art lovers through the work of J.M.W. Turner who witnessed the conflagration and captured his impressions in two spectacular oil paintings and a large-scale, virtuoso watercolour. I was interested to discover today that the well-known series of watercolour sketches formerly identified as depictions of this event have been recently re-identified as portraying the devastating fire at the Tower of London in 1841.

The Burning of the Houses of Parliament, c.1834–5
Tate Collections

Watteau Study by Fresnoy’s Rules, c. 1831

In this imaginative tribute to Watteau, Turner shows the artist at work surrounded by his own paintings. It was around this time that Rococo artists like Watteau were rediscovered after a long interval of disdainful neglect.

detail

Painting from the Tate Collections

Turner at the Acropolis

Sadly, as previously noted on Tigerloaf, England’s greatest painter never visited the Cradle of the Arts. This highly Romantic vision of the Acropolis was achieved in 1830, based on a drawing by the architect Thomas Allason and coloured by Turner’s vivid sensibility. Two years later it was engraved by John Cousen for publication in Finden’s Illustrations of the Life and Works of Lord Byron.

Images from the Tate Collections

The Wreck Buoy, c. 1807

Athens: the Acropolis, c.1830

Another of Turner’s imaginative views of Greece, from the Tate.

Turner in Greece

Actually England’s greatest painter, whose tireless search for scenes and subjects took him on dozens of prolific painting tours through the Continent, never reached the home of the Gods. This Romantic view of the Temple of Poseidon at “holy Sounion, cape of Athens” is none the worse for having been based on the drawings and descriptions of visitors to the site. The watercolour which resides in the Tate was completed around 1834, perhaps as an expression of sympathy with the newly independent Kingdom of Greece.