Existing comment:
Of the Senate House, the President's Palace, the barracks, the dockyard . . . nothing could be seen except heaps of smoking ruins . . .
-- a British officer at Washington, 1814
Panel 24, 1956
A report written by British military officer George Robert Gleig vividly described the total destruction of the American capital by the British during their invasion. Lawrence imagined the two counter-perspectives of this night as a dark trap -- a narrow space bounded and lit by firing cannons on one side and by a massive wall of rubble on the other. The only natural element in the painting is the mortally wounded body of a small black and white bird symbolizing the predicament of Washington's civilian population trapped within the city. |