Art historical reflections on fireworks

Just in time for July 4.

Thomas Patch. “British Gentlemen at Sir Horace Mann’s Home in Florence” (1763-5). Oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1976.7.187.

For an amateur photographer like I, capturing fireworks is tough. My prior July 4 attempts include streaky, inadvertent Impressionistic takes and images freezing in time the darkness immediately before or after fireworks eruptions. The latter remind me of Picasso’s portrayals of off-duty circus performers. I’ve missed the attraction.

More talented photographers have captured phenomenal fireworks imagery, but even many of those pictures risk reducing the experience to just the main actor delivering the soliloquy, like zooming in on a pitcher’s face while ignoring tens of thousands of fans, smells of hotdogs and beer, and crowd din.

Having sifted through several thousand fireworks drawings and paintings—whether as primary subject or tangentially, as in the painting-within-a-painting in the above Thomas Patch—I’ve observed the following:

Nicolas de Larmessin II. “Costume of the Fireworks Maker” (c. 1690). Etching and engraving. Cleveland Museum of Art.

Who makes fireworks?

In this fanciful fireworks-maker costume—part of a series of roughly 70—this French artist depicts the tradesman with a helmet that “appears to spray its own tuft of pyrotechnics into the sky,” per the Cleveland museum. However bizarre, “protective armor” would be an asset to fireworks handlers. In the month around July 4, 180 people a day, on average, go to emergency rooms with related injuries (mostly burns), per the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.

It’s easy to watch fireworks without thinking about how they were made and who risked life and limb to administer them. (Some very cursory research notes that China produces 99 percent of backyard consumer fireworks and 70 percent of professional displays; New Castle, Pa., is the “Fireworks Capital of America.”) This engraving, and others like it, demystify the production of fireworks.

There’s considerably less safety precaution in two c. 1695 mezzotints by Dutch artist Cornelis Dusart (or copies by his student Jacob Gole): of a woman lighting fireworks and of a man with a rocket amid spectators.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard. “Les Pétards” (The Fireworks). C. 1763-5. Pen and brown ink with brush and wash over graphite on cream laid paper. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Voyeuristic diversion

This theme caught me off guard—which I guess is the point.

Someone has reached through a trap door in the ceiling (!) to deposit fireworks (firecrackers?) to startle and rouse sleeping women below, who flee their bed in various stages of undress. The clouds of smoke billowing below, which almost make the scene appear to be an outdoor landscape, testify to the deafening commotion.

Not only is there an engraving after this Fragonard picture at the National Gallery, but this is evidently a more common theme. (More about that here.) Fragonard addressed viewers directly: “Levity is his decency.” Writing in Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1945, Austin A. Mitchell notes, “The humor of this subject may seem a bit crude to our sophisticated taste, but the scene itself is a triumph of draughtsmanship.” Hmm.

Winslow Homer. “Fire-Works on the Night of the Fourth of July” (1868). Wood engraving. Cleveland Museum of Art.

Portraits of viewers

What I like most about this engraving—beyond the firework lodged in the man’s top hat—is that Homer gives us a view almost entirely comprised of spectators. (Some fireworks appear in the distance.) It’s a fireworks-eye view.

This perspective isn’t unique to drawing or painting; Robert Capa did something similar in photography. The decision to render explosions literally obscene (off scene) reminds us that fireworks that rise without anyone around don’t make sounds; spectacles require spectators.

Charles Green Bush. “Fire-Works in the Country” (1869). Wood engraving on paper. The Clark.

Not everyone is impressed

In “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” (c. 1555), attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the son of Daedalus—who has plummeted to his death upon flying too close to the sun with his wax wings—is hard to make out amid a broader landscape. A man plowing in the foreground is either unaware of or doesn’t care about the mythological scene unfolding beyond.

That’s worth remembering with fireworks. In our image, a young woman in the center of the foreground turns her back on the show. The man in the hat with his legs crossed is simply more alluring. It’s a different story altogether in “The Fireworks at Nuremberg” (1570), but there too some people look out on the fireworks, while several figures and horses in the bottom right corner flee in the opposite direction.

Anonymous. “Fireworks display celebrating the end of the Thirty Years War, Nuremberg” (ca. 1650). Copy of a print by Peter Troschel after a drawing by Michael Herz. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Positive or negative space?

Those who admire fireworks see brilliant colors set against black sky, but translating that artfully requires deciding whether to build fireworks up or tone everything else down to allow it to shine through as the original paper or canvas.

In the above 1650 picture, the squid-like fireworks stand out amid a field that’s been rendered quite dark. A similar thing happens in this 1912 ink drawing by Frederic Dorr Steele of fireworks shot off from a boat (Library of Congress), and in Wenceslaus Hollar’s “Fireworks at Hemissem” (c. 1650) at the Met.

The artist who made “Bird’s-Eye View of the Great New York and Brooklyn Bridge and Grand Display of Fireworks on the Opening Night” (1883) had something rather different in mind. And Félix Vallotton’s “The World’s Fair VI: Fireworks” (1900) is one of the starker contrasts between night and fireworks, including a clever graphic rendering of faces and tophats below (Met).

One of my favorites is the dizzying Laurens Scherm etching (1697/8) at the Rijksmuseum in which the fireworks lend themselves to their own sort of drawing.

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri). “Fireworks in a Piazza” (c. 1618-23). Met.

Upstaged

We mentioned above that some spectators aren’t impressed by fireworks. Now we understand why.

Sometimes fireworks are just rather dull-looking, as in this Guercino, where a faint line is far duller than are the figures standing below. That’s also the case in a Jacques Callot etching (1617) at the Met, and in an 18th century Katsushika Hokusai color woodcut “Watching Fireworks on a Cool Summer Evening at Ryogoku Bridge” (Fine Arts Museums of SF).

Detail of fol. 217v. Nuremberg Shrovetide Carnival (1449-1539). Schembartsbuch. Bodleian.

From leaves?

This manuscript, which records costumes and floats from German carnivals, is well worth a close look. As the Bodleian notes, captains of the carnival (including pictured in the detail above) carry ceremonial lances and “a neatly tied bunch of leaves inside which is fireworks, sometimes alight.” That’s pictured above; make of it what you will.

Helen Frankenthaler. “Royal Fireworks” (1975). Sold at Christie’s for $818,500 in 2011.

Abstract

From the Frankenthaler above to Joseph Stella’s “Fireworks” (early 1910s) at the Phillips Collection, and William Kentridge’s “Drawing for ‘Preparing the Flute’ (Temple with fireworks)” (2005) to Joan Miró’s “La Traca II (D. 1115)” (1979), contemporary artists have taken fireworks in a variety of directions.

James Ensor’s “Le feu d’artifice (Fireworks)” (1887) at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery is representational, but it too verges on the abstract. Franziska Holstein’s “Fireworks (Blitzknaller)” (2006) sets the display within architecture, but the form of the fireworks itself set against a black field would make a great scene in its own right.

Utagawa Hiroshige. “Fireworks at Ryogoku (Ryogoku hanabi)” (1852) from the series “Reflections on Water at Famous Places in Edo.” Art Institute of Chicago.

Reflections

If one is lucky enough to see fireworks displays over the water, cast reflections can be particularly stunning. In the this color woodblock print by a Japanese artist, all we see of the fireworks are their echo in the water. Even that is enough to grab the attention of the figures in boats. (My favorite is that deep blue.)

“Ladies Celebrating Diwali” (c. 1760). Northern India, Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper. Cleveland Museum of Art.

Women and fireworks

Last, but certainly not least, I noticed quite a few pictures depicting women viewing and setting off fireworks. In this image, a noblewoman enthroned and other attending women hold sparklers while celebrating the New Year. Men do the same on boats in the distance, and overhead, fireworks are displayed beneath a full moon.

Women also feature prominently (or exclusively) in the Cleveland museum’s “Enjoying the Evening Cool Along the Sumida River” (c. 1797-98) by Kitagawa Utamaro and in the Met’s “Two Court Ladies with Fireworks” (c. 1725), and the goddess Radha plays a central role in “Radha and Krishna watching fireworks in the night sky” at the National Museum in New Delhi.

I’m not sure what, if anything, to make of this beyond that women too viewed firework display spectacles, and did so over the course of centuries. (I see from a search that there are gender-reveal fireworks on the market today, evidently.) I’ll ponder this further; please share thoughts in the comments!