A House Collapsing on Two Firemen, Shoe Lane, London, EC4

image: A collapsing wall is on the point of burying two firemen. Debris, fire and smoke fill the air.

Artist Leonard Rosoman signed up with the Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS) in London at the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1945 he went on to be appointed as an official war artist, travelling to Australia with the British Pacific Fleet. During the 1950s, Rosoman taught at the Royal College of Art where his students included the artist David Hockney. Image Rosoman witnessed this scene of a collapsing wall during the Blitz and painted the picture to exorcise his haunted memory. It became one of his most famous paintings, however in later life he admitted he was disappointed with the result which he saw as too direct and literal. History The AFS was part of the Civil Defence Service and mainly staffed by unpaid volunteers. In London, a group of artists served in the AFS and held a Firemen Artists exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1941, where this painting was exhibited.

The horrific scene in Shoe Lane in the City of London was one that Rosoman witnessed as a fellow fireman. The falling wall trails chaos and disorder in its wake, its own rigid structure about to break and kill the firemen still clutching their hoses. Rosoman later expressed dissatisfaction with the painting as an over literal response but the effect on the viewer is still powerful and intensely disconcerting. The painting was exhibited in the Firemen Artists exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1941. With the outbreak of the Second World War imminent, Leonard Rosoman had joined the auxiliary fire service and continued to serve until April 1945 when he was appointed as an official war artist with the British Pacific fleet. Both the navy and the landscape of blitzed London provided a natural subject for his neo-romantic work where machines are poised to destroy and buildings are animated by destruction.

War Artists Advisory Committee purchase, 1941