An artwork on Galleree from Cleveland Museum of Art.
About the artwork
The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16 October 18341835
Joseph Mallord William Turner
Joseph Mallord William Turner, the supreme landscape painter of the romantic era, had the exceptional good fortune to be the son of a Covent Garden barber and wigmaker who thoroughly supported his aspirations to paint pictures. As an adolescent, Turner colored engravings for the print sellers and apprenticed with architectural draftsman Thomas Malton (1726-1801). Although he entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1789, Turner's substantive artistic training came from his numerous self-conducted topographical drawing tours of the British Isles in the early 1790s and from his camaraderie with Thomas Girtin (1775-1802), with whom he copied the masterworks of landscape watercolorist John Robert Cozens (1752-1799) in the collection of Dr. Thomas Monro (1759-1833). Turner submitted his first oil painting, a seascape, for exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1796 and was elected an associate member three years later, at the earliest permissible age. Devoted to the academy's lofty mission, as it had been articulated by the recently deceased Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) in his annual lectures to the students of the academy, Turner would relish his election as a full academician in 1802 and would serve as professor of perspective from 1807 until 1837. His masterpieces of the early decades (and there seems an endless succession of works with title to that distinction) were either homages to past masters of landscape painting or entirely personal interpretations of the most extraordinary range of naturalistic effects and subjects. Whether it was The Fifth Plague of Egypt (1800, Indianapolis Museum of Art) and its amalgam of allusions to Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and Richard Wilson (1714-1782), The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed (1818, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven), with its overt tribute to Aelbert Cuyp (1620-1691), or The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons (1810, Tate Gallery, London), with its unprecedented invention of horrific naturalistic detail that challenged conventional notions of the sublime in art, the net effect of Turner's achievement was to elevate landscape painting to a status within the traditional hierarchy of genres that it had rarely enjoyed since the seventeenth century. Unlike Constable (q.v.), Turner was an indefatigable traveler abroad. His first visit to Switzerland in 1802 resulted in a spectacular series of exhibition watercolors that boldly established watercolor painting as a vital medium of original expression. A tour of Belgium, the Netherlands, and the Rhine in 1817 was followed by his first protracted stay in Italy in 1819. After 1820 summer excursions to France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and especially Venice were almost annual occurrences. Gradually, and primarily after the 1819 Italian sojourn, Turner's palette lightened. Traditional notions of chiaroscuro, of alternating bands of light and dark earth colors, yielded to compositions orchestrated in brighter hues, in which the various colors move across the painted surface almost at will, little respecting the forms they describe but in perfect balance.
During the 1820s and early 1830s Turner committed vast amounts of his creative capital to the production of literary and travel illustrations. These kept an entire generation of engravers employed for several decades. Despite the tendency of his era to stigmatize reproductive engraving as an inferior instrument of artistic presentation, Turner was preoccupied with its processes and potential, acutely aware that, long after his pigments had faded, his reputation would be secure in the more durable brilliance of the engraver's deftly crafted reproductions. A second trip to Italy in 1828 may partially account for the heightened coloring of Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus (1828, National Gallery, London), which John Ruskin described as a pivotal picture in Turner's career. But there was very little falling off in either technical or thematic invention during the last decades of Turner's life. In major oils like Snow Storm-Steam Boat Off a Harbor's Mouth (1842, Tate Gallery, London) and Rain, Steam and Speed (1844, National Gallery, London) and no less measure in the series of elaborately finished Swiss watercolors executed on commission at the end of his life, natural forms occupy an uncertain place between concrete reality and total dissolution by light into the colors and images of what Monet (q.v.) admiringly called the "exuberant romanticism of Turner's fancy." Perspective can be intentionally distorted and the color schemes can approach the brazenly artificial, yet somehow the fundamental truth of Turner's vision, his faith in the supreme forces of nature and in the artist's preeminence as the mediator of that experience, continues to persuade.
Fire consumed London’s famous Houses of Parliament on the night of October 16, 1834, and people gathered along the banks of the river Thames to gaze in awe at the horrifying spectacle. Initially, a low tide made it difficult to pump water to land and hampered steamers towing firefighting equipment along the river. The blaze burned uncontrollably for hours.<br><br>J. M. W. Turner records the struggle as the boats in the lower-right corner head toward the flames. Although Turner based the painting on an actual event, he magnified the height of the flames, using the disaster as the starting point to express man’s helplessness when confronted with the destructive powers of nature. Brilliant swathes of color and variable atmospheric effects border on abstraction.
Turner painted two versions of this event. Cleveland's painting views the fire downriver, from the southeast bank of the Thames, while the second version at the Philadelphia Museum of Art views the fire from directly across Westminster Bridge.
oil on canvas
Framed: 123.5 x 153.5 x 12 cm (48 5/8 x 60 7/16 x 4 3/4 in.); Unframed: 92 x 123.2 cm (36 1/4 x 48 1/2 in.)
Bequest of John L. Severance
On a chilly October night in 1834, the air around the river Thames quivered with an unsettling mix of anticipation and dread. The sun had long surrendered to darkness, and as shadows danced across the water’s surface, an inferno unfolded in the heart of London. The Houses of Parliament, grand and majestic, fell victim to a fire that swallowed up the night. Flames licked the sky, bold and relentless, as crowds of people congregated along the riverbanks. They stood transfixed, their faces illuminated by the flickering glow of destruction, their eyes shimmering with a mix of horror and fascination.
The Thames, usually a calm and nurturing presence, seemed to conspire against the desperate efforts of the firefighters. The tide was low, a cruel twist of fate that hampered their attempts to draw water from its depths. Steamers, laden with hopes of salvation, struggled against nature’s stronghold, inching slowly toward the furious blaze. As the fire raged on, consuming all in its path, hours stretched into an eternity. The collective gasp of the crowd echoed along the riverway, each person feeling a bond forged in fear and wonder.
In that moment, J. M. W. Turner—an artist with an eye attuned to nature’s caprice—captured the scene not just as an observer but as a chronicler of human emotion. With his brush, he immortalized this epic struggle against chaos, painting the boats scurrying toward the flames, tiny figures dwarfed by the towering inferno. Yet, Turner did not simply depict what was there, he intensified it, transforming the flames into a wild, swirling dance of color that reached toward the heavens, revealing the sublime terror man faces when confronted with nature's fierce might.
His canvas breathed with the vibrancy of life and chaos, hues that raced across the surface like the very fire he painted. Turner’s work became more than a record of disaster; it transcended into a meditation on vulnerability, capturing the raw essence of humanity's frailty in the wake of nature’s overwhelming power. What began as a tragic event morphed into an exploration of the spirit, where brilliant swathes of color merged with chilling realities, flirting with abstraction and inviting the viewer into a reflection on existence itself. As those embers continued to blaze, they illuminated not just the darkened skies but also the core of human experience—an eternal dance with both beauty and destruction.
About the artist
Creating transformative experiences through art “for the benefit of all the people forever.”The Cleveland Museum of Art is renowned for the quality and breadth of its collection, which includes more than 66,500 artworks and spans 6,000 years of achievement in the arts. The artworks shared on this platform are sourced from the museum's Open Access data under the CC0 license. No endorsement is implied.Address: 11150 East Boulevard, Cleveland, OH, USA 44106
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