SKU: 40705295559

Fire: Flashes to Ashes in British Art 1692-2019

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Fire: Flashes to Ashes in British Art 1692-2019THIS EXHIBITION HAS NOW CLOSED PLEASE CLICK HERE TO SEE OUR CURRENT EXHIBITIONS Book online today and save over 1 on adult admission tickets. Purchasing a Gift Aid ticket will enable us to claim an extra 25p of Gift Aid for every 1 you donate. With your support, people of all ages can be inspired by our exhibitions and creative activities. To enable us to claim Gift Aid, please give your full name, first line of address and postcode at the checkout.

THIS EXHIBITION HAS NOW CLOSED

PLEASE CLICK HERE TO SEE OUR CURRENT EXHIBITIONS

Book online today and save over £1 on adult admission tickets. Purchasing a Gift Aid ticket will enable us to claim an extra 25p of Gift Aid for every £1 you donate. With your support, people of all ages can be inspired by our exhibitions and creative activities. To enable us to claim Gift Aid, please give your full name, first line of address and postcode at the checkout. By purchasing this ticket you agree that you have read our Gift Aid Declaration.


A major exhibition tracing the representation of fire in British art across the last four centuries; exploring the symbolism and meaning the element has had for artists throughout history.

Featured in The Times, The Spectator and Art Quarterly

Fire: Flashes to Ashes in British Art 1692-2019, is the third in a series of element-themed exhibitions at the RWA, bringing together a number of important historic, modern and contemporary artworks. Destructive and creative, fearsome and fascinating⁠—fire is a subject loaded with symbolism, ritual and emotion.

Unsurprisingly, the subject of fire has attracted artists throughout the ages. This exhibition will examine how artists’ approaches have changed over time, recording historical, religious, domestic or natural events as well as exploring fire as a material phenomenon informed by contemporary themes and issues.

This exhibition shows how vital fire has been to the human experience, through technology, storytelling and symbolism and how the duality of our relationship with the element continues to fascinate in the 21st century.

Fire features the following artists: Roger Ackling, William Bankes Fortescue RWA RBA, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham CBE RWA Hon, Siân Bowen, Sophie Clements, John Cleveley the Elder, John Robert Cozens, John Collier OBE RP ROI, Mat Collishaw, Stephen Cripps, Jeremy Deller, Toni Davey RWA, Michael Faraday, Stanhope Alexander Forbes RA RWA, Douglas Gordon, Ralph Hedley RBA, Susan Hiller, David Inshaw RWA, John Latham, Aoife van Linden Tol, John Martin, Anthony McCall, Nadège Mériau, John Minton, Catherine Morland, David Nash RA, John Nash CBE RA, Rachael Nee RWA, Cornelia Parker OBE RA, Sarah Pickering, James Pimperton, John Piper CH, James Baker Pyne RBA, Eric Ravilious, Claude Rogers OBE RWA, Aura Satz, Godfried Schalcken, Samuel Scott, Rolinda Sharples RBA Hon, Tim Shaw RA RWA Hon, Stanley Spencer CBE RA, Emma Stibbon RA RWA, Marianne Stokes, Graham Sutherland OM, J. M. W. Turner RA, Karl Weschke, Joseph Wright of Derby ARA

Please note that a tour of this exhibition runs every Tuesday from 12-12.30pm and is free to all ticket holders.

 


Opening times

This ticket may be redeemed any day that we are open within the exhibition dates (15 Jun–1 Sept 19).

Tuesday-Saturday 10am-5.30pm
Sunday 11am-5pm
CLOSED Mondays
Last admission 30 minutes before closing. The RWA occasionally closes early for special events. Please call ahead or check the website for details.


Ways to Pay

ONLINE TICKETS: Save over £1 on adult admission tickets by booking online at least 12 hours before your visit. Simply show your email order receipt to reception to gain entry. Please note that each ticket can only be used once. 

RWA ART PASS: The Art Pass allows you to visit any RWA exhibition, as many times as you want, for one whole year. 

ON THE DOOR: 

Adults: £7.95 (includes an 80p donation) £6.95 online
Concessions: £6.75 (includes a 70p donation). Pay on the door
Under 18s/SGS, UoB & UWE students: FREE
RWA Art Pass Holders: FREE Purchase an Art Pass
Friends of the RWA: FREE Join today
National Art Pass holders: 50% discount on ticket price. Pay on the door


Gift Aid Declaration: Purchasing a Gift Aid ticket will enable us to claim an extra 25p of Gift Aid for every £1 you donate. By purchasing a Gift Aid ticket you agree that you have read and agree to the following Gift Aid Declaration:

Please treat this entry ticket to the RWA as a Gift Aid Donation. I am a UK taxpayer and understand that if I pay less Income Tax and/or Capital Gains Tax than the amount of Gift Aid claimed on all my donations in that tax year, it is my responsibility to pay any difference.   

Image credits | 1: Exhibition (installation view). Photographer: Lisa Whiting. Foreground: Tim Shaw RA RWA Hon, Man on Fire, 2009 (reworked 2015)  black painted foam and polythene on steel, 350 x 400 x 240cm | 2, 3, 4 & 5: Exhibition (installation view). Photographer: Lisa Whiting | 6: Joseph Wright of Derby ARA (1734-1797) Vesuvius in Eruption, with a View over the Islands in the Bay of Naples, c. 1776-80, oil on canvas, 122 x 176.4cm. Tate: Purchased with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund, Friends of the Tate Gallery, and Mr John Ritblat 1990. Image © Tate, London 2019
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SKU: 40705295559

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4.3 ★★★★★
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Diogenes
Port Orchard, US
★★★★★ 3
Interesting read, but takes some getting used to
I heard about this book on a blog, and figured I'd check it out. It's the rambling tale of a man determined to give you every last detail of everything that might be important to the narrative of his life. Unfortunately, he goes on tangets so often that he doesn't even get to his birth for several chapters, let alone the story of the rest of his life. Along the way, you're introduced to lots of random characters who are (at best) loosely related to the protagonist, but as often as not these tangents are fairly amusing. The writing is pretty dense, and this along with the tangents had me putting the book down fairly often. It's probably ideal for a commuting book, but I never wanted to just sit down and blitz through big chunks of it. Overall it's a very different kind of experience than a novel reader typically gets. It's worth a read for a change of pace, but I can't say it's a life-altering read.
WAS THIS REVIEW HELPFUL?YesReportShare
Reviewed in the United States on March 21, 2013
J
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J. W. Kennedy
Massapequa, US
★★★★★ 4
Mixed Bag
Everyone should know, first off, that the Dover thrift edition is NOT a graphic adaptation. For some reason, Amazon has attached editorial reviews from the hardcover edition of the graphic novel version to this page. Now, the book itself offers a range of experiences from delightfully hilarious to annoyingly tedious. Lots of the "funny" parts depend on an understanding of 18th-century social mores. I'm sure some of it went over my head but I'm enough of a nerd to have enjoyed most of the drollery. I think... The story is whimsical, told all out of order by a scatterbrained, easily-distracted narrator. Tristram Shandy himself is hardly in the novel at all; aside from narrating it, he only appears momentarily as a newborn infant and then as a boy about 6 years old - and his role in both incidents seems peripheral to the carryings-on of the other characters. Each turn in the story reminds the author of something else, and he turns aside to tell stories inside of stories, each of which are necessary to give the reader some vital "background information" .. with the result that the main story hardly moves forward at all. It takes nearly 200 pages just for Tristram to be born! and even then the reader isn't quite sure it has happened since the conversations and minute actions of the other characters are magnified to such an importance that the narrator's own birth is hardly observed. For the most part this rambling comes across as "quirky and delightful" and the novel flows along quite pleasingly in spite (or perhaps because) of it. The digressions add layers to the story. Except when they don't. The "chapter upon noses" which is a translation of a fictitious(?) Latin work by the great Slwakenbergius, has little bearing on the story. Like most of the book, it builds up to a climax and then stops short of resolution, leaving you to wonder what was the point. It leads nowhere, but at least it was interesting. The same cannot be said of Book VII, which is a sort of travel diary of Tristram (in the novel's "present" time) touring France by post-chaise. Although this is the only significant appearance of Tristram himself as a character in the book, it has absolutely nothing to do with the story/stories he was telling, and it is neither very interesting nor very funny. It serves as nothing but a pointless interruption, delaying the reader for 50 pages before getting to the part we were waiting for: Toby's courtship of the widow Wadman. This last section goes along nicely for a while, and then the book stops. It doesn't end; it just stops right in the middle of a conversation, with the courtship unresolved and most of the reader's questions unanswered. This is perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the entire novel, but I have to admit it's frustrating. I had trouble deciding whether to give this book 3 or 4 stars but I think it entertained me more than it exasperated me, so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt ... and round up from 3.5. It's worth reading once, just for the experience - there's no other book quite like it - and the price of the Dover Thrift Edition can't be beat.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 23, 2010
L
Verified Purchase
Lawrentius Verifer
Chelsea, US
★★★★★ 5
An extraordinary tale of an 18th Century family
Have you wanted to read a book where the author decides to "rip out" one of the chapters, or leaves a blank page for you to 'draw' one of the characters? Would you enjoy a story which takes many chapters before the hero manages to be born? This 18th-Century tale is touchingly told. The characters are real, and fascinating. It's not their fault that their story is frequently and impishly interrupted by outlandish "digressions" on the part of an author so creative that his modern descendants are considered to be Joyce and Beckett, as well as many others. Would you enjoy a chapter on Chapters? About buttonholes? About whether parents and their children are kin to each other? A chapter on curses? Poor Laurence Sterne has so much trouble getting two of his characters down the stairs that he finally calls in a "critic" to help! Advice on reading such an unusual, even unique, book: read the first several chapters, then stop and reread them. Continue that process and soon the book will feel quite familiar, and that's when the fun really starts. The Oxford World's Classics edition follows the first edition of the book, and is preferred. Amazon also offers the fully-annotated edition, the "Florida" edition, in three volumes. A caution about the Everyman hardcover edition: they reprinted a later edition which groups Tristram Shandy into three volumes, not nine. And then they renumbered all the chapters! That's OK unless you read secondary sources that refer you to Book VII, Chap 4: good luck ever finding it.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 4, 2000
M
Verified Purchase
Martin M. Bodek
Phoenix, US
★★★★★ 1
A Total Sham-dy
What in the hell was this lunatic yammering about for all those 650 pages? What is the deal with his obession with noses, penises, and hobby-horses, hobby-horses, hobby-horses? Why does anyone consider it amusing when a writer keeps telling you he's going to get somewhere, but never does? Why is it entertaining at all to have blank chapters? Why is that cute? Why is that interesting? Who finds this funny? Who finds anything funny here at all? Why does this book of endless, mindless prattle, blabber, and piffle tickle anyone at all? Who finds digression to be enjoyable in literature? You? Why? Why? Tell me! I checked the ratings on Goodreads. This is what it showed: 5 stars: 33%, 4901 4 stars: 28%, 4064 3 stars: 22%, 3268 2 stars: 9%, 1414 1 star: 5%, 848 Meaning: 95% of these readers are flock-following, digression-loving, hobby-horse riding loonies who have swallowed the Kool-aid. There is nothing here but vacuous thundergunk. Pure, putrid unenertaining garbage. If I would have laughed once - just once - during the reading of this book, I would have given it a whole extra star, but it couldn't even do that. I give him one star for spelling Tristram's name right, and even then, it's a made-up name anyway, so I may have been hoodwinked as well.
WAS THIS REVIEW HELPFUL?YesReportShare
Reviewed in the United States on September 19, 2016
M
Verified Purchase
Michael Harold
Massapequa, US
★★★★★ 5
Laurence Stern is still one of the most creative writers ever
This review is not about the words and images inside the book. This is about the fact that, when I removed the book from its packaging, the book's cover had too many creases and bends in it, both front and back, for my taste. Although I do think that Laurence Sterne might have smiled at my response, I don't think the creases were a type of samizdat (think Alexander Solzhenitsyn) added by a disgruntled/creative employee at Amazon. If this doesn't make any sense to you, or seems to be a silly mountain out of a molehill compliant, you will love the book.
WAS THIS REVIEW HELPFUL?YesReportShare
Reviewed in the United States on February 21, 2025

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