‘Playing God is indeed playing with fire,’ observed Ronald Dworkin. ‘But that is what we mortals have done since Prometheus, the patron saint of dangerous discoveries.’
There’s no Prometheus in the RWA’s new exhibition Fire: Flashes to Ashes in British Art 1692–2019, but there are plenty of flames, some dangerous, some not. The third in the Bristol gallery’s trilogy of shows on elemental themes, following The Power of the Sea (2014) and Air (2017), Fire features the most dramatic of the four elements, and the most fun to paint. Artists love playing with fire. It’s a subject that has held audiences in thrall since medieval worshippers were kept on the edge of their pews by ‘Doom’ paintings warning of the hellfire awaiting them if they fell asleep during the sermon.
Sadly most of those went up in smoke during the Reformation, and British audiences had to wait for the Dutch tenebrist Godfried Schalcken to cross the Channel in the 1690s and relight our extinguished fire-painting tradition with his ‘Boy Blowing on a Firebrand to Light a Candle’ (c.1692–98),
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