Conflagration of the Masonic Hall, Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Samuel Jones · 1819

Medium

Oil on mahogany panel

Original size

48.4 × 60 cm (19 3/16 × 22 3/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Neoclassicism

Painted in the immediate aftermath of the March 1819 fire, Samuel Jones's depiction of the Masonic Hall's destruction stands as one of the earliest American works to document a major urban disaster as it was still smouldering in public memory. Jones worked in the tradition of topographical and documentary painting that flourished in early nineteenth-century America, where eyewitness fidelity carried as much weight as artistic composition. His choice of mahogany panel as a support — rather than canvas — gave the work a fine-grained, luminous surface well-suited to capturing the billowing smoke, leaping flames, and dense crowd gathered on Chestnut Street. The result reads less like a theatrical set piece and more like a witnessed event held still. The Masonic Hall, completed in 1811, had been one of Philadelphia's most celebrated neoclassical buildings, which lent its destruction a particular civic gravity at the time. This hand-painted oil reproduction is executed on canvas by a skilled studio artist, faithfully rendering the original's dramatic composition, tonal contrasts, and the quiet urgency that makes Jones's painting such an unusual document of early American city life.