Conflagration of the Masonic Hall, Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Samuel Jones (c. 1819)

Conflagration of the Masonic Hall, Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Samuel Jones (1819)

Samuel Jones’s Conflagration of the Masonic Hall captures one of Philadelphia’s most shocking early 19th-century disasters. On the night of March 9, 1819, the city’s Masonic Hall—barely eight years old—was consumed by flames, its grand architecture reduced to rubble. Commissioned as part of a project to produce a widely circulated print, Jones’s painting records the devastation in vivid detail: firelight reflecting against the night sky, collapsing timbers, and bystanders frozen between awe and terror.

The work functioned both as art and as early visual journalism. Collaborator John Lewis Krimmel, America’s first great genre painter, was tasked with developing the figural drama in the foreground for the print, though it remains uncertain whether his hand touched this canvas. In either case, the painting exemplifies how spectacle, tragedy, and art converged in an era before photography—preserving the fire not only as an urban catastrophe, but as a public event consumed by thousands through prints and imagination alike.

Cotton and polyester canvas on Radiata pine wood frame sourced from renewable forests. Includes back mounting.