The Fire Works Show

One small room in the National Gallery's Turner show has been devoted to two oil paintings of "The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons" and to 11 glowing, barely-there watercolors of that and other fires.

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This single display would be worth a trip to the National Gallery, even if the other 11 rooms of its Turner exhibition weren't there. It's a study in the strange contradictions between information and evocation, communication and concealment that govern all of Turner's art.

On the evening of Oct. 16, 1834, a fire to burn surplus wood in the House of Lords turned into an inferno that destroyed the ancient home of the British Parliament. All of London turned out to watch in fascination and horror. Turner was among the onlookers and, always on the lookout for a popular, salable subject, he recorded what he saw in the pictures now on view in Washington.

That's a fine story, as far as it goes. But the paintings themselves complicate it.

First of all, those "on-the-spot" watercolors almost certainly weren't. When he was actually an eyewitness to the fire, on the far bank of the Thames or out on a boat in its middle (or at least that's where he makes us think he was) Turner seems at most to have made a few quick scribbles with a pencil. The watercolors would have come later in the safety and comfort of his studio, according to the artist's absolutely standard practice.

So Turner's flamboyant color "studies" of the fire aren't the immediate, inspired reactions to seen light and color and movement that they seem. They are carefully crafted simulations of such reactions. They are more theatrical than documentary.

The two oil paintings seem to capture an impression of the conflagration from specific points of view, and at precise moments in its raging -- but we shouldn't be too ready to buy into their precision, given what we know about the watercolors they were based on.

One especially striking watercolor of the action, a bit more detailed than the others, shows the fire from a completely different viewpoint: From up close on the north side of the Thames, in the thick of firefighters hosing down the flames and soldiers trying to keep rubberneckers back. It's possible that Turner might have ranged that widely on that smoky night. But it's equally possible that this strikingly realistic scene is a fiction, conceived as an engraving for a pamphlet promoting a "Plan for the Establishment of a Metropolitan Fire Police" and built on earlier sketches Turner had done of the intact buildings. After all, if Turner could make a completely convincing "eyewitness" watercolor of the burning of ancient Rome -- included in this "Fire" gallery -- who's to say what is truth or fiction in his art?

Someone as skilled in constructing space and light as Turner didn't have to stick to facts. He could conjure up the world according to his whim, proclaim it as truth, and then stand back and let his viewers take it or leave it, as they pleased.