Walter Korder Art

The Great Fire of London in September 1666 was one of the greatest disasters in the city’s history. The City, with its wooden houses crowded together in narrow streets, was a natural fire risk, and predictions that London would burn down became a shocking reality. The fire began in a bakery in Pudding Lane, an area near the Thames teeming with warehouses and shops full of flammable materials, such as timber, oil, coal, pitch and turpentine. Inevitably the fire spread rapidly from this area into the City. Our painting depicts the impact of the fire on those who were caught in it and creates a very dramatic impression of what the fire was like. Closer inspection reveals a scene of chaos and panic with people running out of the gates. It shows Cripplegate in the north of the City, with St Giles without Cripplegate to its left, in flames (on the site of the present day Barbican). The painting probably represents the fire on the night of Tuesday 4 September, when four-fifths of the City was burning at once, including St Paul's Cathedral. Old St Paul’s can be seen to the right of the canvas, the medieval church with its thick stone walls, was considered a place of safety, but the building was covered in wooden scaffolding as it was in the midst of being restored by the then little known architect, Christopher Wren and caught fire. Our painting seems to depict a specific moment on the Tuesday night when the lead on St Paul’s caught fire and, as the diarist John Evelyn described: ‘the stones of Paul’s flew like grenades, the melting lead running down the streets in a stream and the very pavements glowing with the firey redness, so as no horse, nor man, was able to tread on them.’ Although the loss of life was minimal, some accounts record only sixteen perished, the magnitude of the property loss was shocking – some four hundred and thirty acres, about eighty per cent of the City proper was destroyed, including over thirteen thousand houses, eighty-nine churches, and fifty-two Guild Halls. Thousands were homeless and financially ruined. The Great Fire, and the subsequent fire of 1676, which destroyed over six hundred houses south of the Thames, changed the appearance of London forever. The one constructive outcome of the Great Fire was that the plague, which had devastated the population of London since 1665, diminished greatly, due to the mass death of the plague-carrying rats in the blaze. The fire was widely reported in eyewitness accounts, newspapers, letters and diaries. Samuel Pepys recorded climbing the steeple of Barking Church from which he viewed the destroyed City: ‘the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw.’ There was an official enquiry into the causes of the fire, petitions to the King and Lord Mayor to rebuild, new legislation and building Acts. Naturally, the fire became a dramatic and extremely popular subject for painters and engravers. A group of works relatively closely related to the present picture have been traditionally ascribed to Jan Griffier...

Collections: Robert Isaacson; James Draper, New York, 2014. Exhibited: Cambridge, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Beggarstaffs: William Nicholson and James Pr...

Oil Painting Portrait of John Campbell, 4th Duke of Argyll,, att to John Vanderbank (1694-1739) Housed in a swept frame which has been restored after photo. Canvas Size 50" x 40", Fr...

Andre Minaux (French 1923 - 1986) "Femme et Homards" / Woman with Lobsters. Oil on canvas. Features a young woman holding one lobster while two others sit on a counter before her. ...

Artist: Bernhard Buter (1883-1959) German Title: Rhinish Landscape Medium: Oil on Canvas Dimensions: Framed 19” x 21” , Unframed 11 x 13” Bernhard Buter paints agrarian landscapes i...

Mikhail Yakhilevich (Israeli, Russian) Boating 116x89 cm oil on canvas Michael Yakhilevitz was born in 1956 in Moscow. He graduated from The Stage Design Department of The Moscow Ar...

Dramatic oil on canvas surrealist painting by John Abrahamson (American 20th Century) depicting a nude male with the motto Partitus Ero or I wager in Latin. Abrahamson is known for h...

Provenance: The artist Karl Hutter Fine Art, Beverly Hills

Jim Woodson, Transforming Embedded Emergents, Oil on canvas, 72 x 96", 2020

Women in Abstract Expressionism: Colorful Sunset Inspired Artwork by Texas artist Winter Rusiloski. Details: Winter Rusiloski Cathedral, 2016 Oil on canvas 48 x 45" View works. Wind...

Rene Genis (French 1922-2004) “Les Falaise Normande” / The Cliffs of Normand. A sea scape with high cliffs, the beach, and two fishermen. The cliffs are in browns, tans and olives a...

Rene Genis (French 1922-2004) Monument Valley. 1967. Beautiful oranges, browns, greens against a turquoise blue sky. Oil on canvas, laid on mat. Si...