Joseph Mallord William Turner

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). This one of the most atmospheric and least detailed of the studies, but there are slight indications of the cuboid, turreted form of the White Tower to the right of the centre, suggesting that the view is from the north-east.

Addressing the sequence of studies in the context of the traditional former 1834 identification, Katherine Solender felt that the ‘fluid colours’ of this work, D24849 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

In 2008 the German-based Japanese painter and photographer Hiroyuki Masuyama (born 1968) produced an LED lightbox image based on the present work as one of a series reinterpreting Turner’s landscapes, combining the original composition with digitally layered photographic landscape and architectural elements.4

Technical notes:

There is extensive watercolour offsetting on the verso (D40156), transferred from Tate D27849 (Turner Bequest CCLXXXIII 4).