Fires, fire-fighting, firemen, equipment etc

Fire has been among the most feared and most visually compelling of all urban disasters, and the prints documenting great conflagrations and the efforts to suppress them form one of the most dramatic bodies of imagery in the entire tradition of popular illustration. From the Great Fire of London in 1666 — the first major urban fire to be extensively documented in print — to the catastrophic conflagrations that destroyed large portions of Chicago, San Francisco and other nineteenth-century cities built of timber and serviced by gas lighting, fire imagery combines the visual drama of destruction with the historical significance of events that reshaped urban landscapes and drove the development of building regulations, insurance systems and organised fire suppression.

The Great Fire of London generated printed imagery almost immediately, and the prints produced in the weeks and months following the fire of 1666 are among the earliest examples of what would become a distinct tradition of disaster illustration. Views of the city in flames, maps showing the extent of the destruction, and portraits of the ruins left by the fire all appeared in editions sufficient to meet a public demand for visual documentation of an event that had transformed the most important city in the kingdom. These early fire prints established conventions for the representation of urban conflagration that persisted through subsequent centuries.

The development of organised fire insurance in the early eighteenth century — and the competing insurance companies’ fire brigades that were the primary form of fire suppression until the establishment of municipal fire services in the nineteenth century — generated its own body of illustrative material. The hand-pumped fire engines of the Georgian era, operated by competing insurance company brigades who were formally obliged to suppress only fires in buildings bearing their company’s mark, appear in prints that document both the equipment and the social world of early fire-fighting with considerable specificity.

The steam-powered fire engine, introduced in the 1820s and progressively adopted by fire brigades through the mid-nineteenth century, transformed the capacity of organised fire suppression and generated a new tradition of fire-fighting illustration that reflected public fascination with the new technology. The Metropolitan Fire Brigade, established in London in 1865 under the command of Captain Eyre Massey Shaw, became a celebrated institution whose operations — particularly the spectacular night fires of the Victorian city — attracted illustrators who found in fire-fighting scenes a combination of mechanical drama, physical courage and visual spectacle that was unmatched by any other subject of popular illustration.

Australian fire imagery has a particular historical significance, documenting both the urban conflagrations that periodically devastated colonial cities built largely of timber and the bush fires that have been a constant feature of the Australian environment. The Black Thursday bush fire of 1851, which burned across approximately five million hectares of Victoria on a single day, was documented in prints that are among the earliest visual records of large-scale Australian bush fire, and they remain important evidence for the environmental and social history of colonial Victoria.

For collectors of social history, the history of technology or the visual culture of urban disaster, antique fire and fire-fighting prints offer material of unusual documentary richness and consistent visual drama. They document both the catastrophic power of uncontrolled fire and the organised human response to it across two centuries of urban history, preserving evidence of events whose physical traces have largely disappeared.