Fireworks | Ric W. Horner

#LewesBonfireNightPaintings

The Lewes Bonfire Night, or the #LewesBonfire Night Celebrations, is the biggest celebrated Fifth November Event in the world, and is held in the usually peaceful county town of Lewes, East Sussex, every year on 5th November, and the carnival or festival is known as either the Lewes Bonfire Night Celebrations, Lewes Bonfire Night or just simply the Fifth.

Lewes Bonfire, or Bonfire for short, describes a set of celebrations held in the town of Lewes, Sussex, England, that constitute the United Kingdom’s largest and most famous Bonfire Night festivities, with Lewes being called the bonfire capital of the world. The event not only marks Guy Fawkes Night – the date of the uncovering of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 – but also commemorates the memory of the seventeen Protestant martyrs from the town burned at the stake for their faith during the Marian Persecutions.

As well as this, 25–30 societies from all around Sussex come to Lewes on the fifth to march the streets. This can mean up to 5,000 people taking part in the celebrations, and up to 80,000 spectators attending in the county market town.

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In the same year as the British Museum put on a blockbuster exhibition called ‘Life and death in Pompeii and Herculaneum’, 2013 (www.britishmuseum.org/pompeii-live) Ric also created a solo show on the subject of the ancient Roman city Pompeii, hoping to transport people back to AD 79 to discover how life was transformed in just 24 hours, when the two cities in the Bay of Naples, southern Italy, were buried by a catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

Hoping to recreate how it looks now, and how it may well have looked during and after the famous eruption of Mount Vesuvius he said:

“Pompeii is paradoxical, the city was once the site of a tremendous environmental catastrophe, but now all is serene and in a state of artful decay. Ironically, its preservation was due to its destruction -had it not been buried by the layers of ash, it would not be here today. In this particular series I tried to convey these unique qualities. When creating the work, I found that I had tapped into a similar colour palette to the one artists used when painting frescos in and around the city before the eruption. This may not have been a coincidence and may be linked to the strong Italian sunlight and its location near the Bay of Naples.”

Another exhibition of Pompeii that is currently running is at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. This show is on until September 2023. (msichicago.org/pompeii)