L'Incendie des Chambres des Lords et des Communes, 16 octobre 1834

On 16 October 1834 the clerks at the Exchequer burned two cartloads of old tally sticks, the notched wooden receipts the Treasury had used since the Middle Ages, in the furnaces under the House of Lords. The flues overheated, the panelling caught, and by midnight most of the medieval Palace of Westminster was gone. Turner watched from the river, filling sketchbooks. The following February he brought a canvas to the British Institution in Pall Mall for the varnishing days, the short window before an exhibition opened when artists could still work on their pictures in the room. The painter Edward Rippingille was there. What arrived, he wrote, was a mere dab of several colours, without form and void. Turner stood at the wall for about three hours, never once turning round, then packed up and went. He was 59. He painted the fire a second time that year for the Royal Academy, and that canvas is in Philadelphia.