Fire Scene
Painted by Theodore Gegoux (1850-1931)
Oil on board, measuring 22 inches by 28 inches, signed and dated 1925.
Painted at Champoeg, Oregon.  
 
 
This painting is a copy of the painting by the Russian artist Aleksei Denisov (1864 - 1926) originally titled "Lesnoi Pozhar" (Forest Fire), completed in about 1903.   Size of Denisov's original was about 10 feet by 6 feet.   Gegoux was commissioned to paint, for the son of a neighbor, this version of the iconic image based on a wall calendar.  
 
The following was written by Stephen J. Pyne .. See .. "Untamed Art" Forest History Today, Fall 2008  
The world’s most famous painting of a forest fire is also its most misidentified.  Anyone even casually familiar with fire art or the least bit curious about pre-photographic images of wildland fires will recognize the scene instantly.  The focal point is a slow-swirl pillar of flame rising through a patch of boreal forest.  The fire gathers in a ragged eddy along the forest floor before sweeping upward against the wind and twisting through the canopy with a convective heave and a reverse eddy of flame and smoke.  The symmetries are nearly perfect; sky and earth balanced with a layer of mossy forest between them; the deep woods wedging to the center and there cleaved evenly by that archetypal spiral of flame.  
The painting has been widely reproduced, and variations on its scene abound in various media, with varying internal proportions and sizes.  Some versions insert fire-scarred pines; some even include a cottage and firefighters.  You can find them in color lithographs hanging in kitchens, old garages, even a few bars, and bins at second-hand stores.  The U.S. Forest Service has a black-and-white print in its historic photo collection.   A Bavarian ceramics company reproduced it on porcelain plates.   Pre-World War II Japan manufactured facsimiles using silken thread.  Grandma Moses copied the scene, as have other American primitives.   A Wisconsin woman won a folk art festival by submitting a variant she painted, fraudulently claiming she reproduced the image not from a reproduction on her living room wall but from real-world fires remembered from her youth. Others insisted that the scene commemorates the 1871 Peshtigo fire.  More recently, versions have appeared on eBay amid various testimonies to authenticity (original oil) and prices ranging up to $850.  
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Exhibitions:  
1904 .. St. Louis World's Fair and Exposition  
1905 and the subsequent 70 years after .. Busch Brewery, St. Louis, Missouri  
1914 .. Carnegie Public Library, Forh Worth, Texas  
 
References:  
1) "History of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, MO" .. Bennitt, Mark and Frank Parker Stockbridge, eds., Universal Exposition Publishing Company, 1905.
1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (the St. Louis World’s Fair), where it walked away with a "big silver medal", one of twelve awarded.  
2) Cleveland Leader December 4, 1904 ..   Lesnoi pozhar was reproduced as a Sunday supplement.  
3) Fort Worth Star Telegram - March 3, 1914 (www.genealogybank.com)
Art Treasures From Bush Estate to Be Shown Here
Paintings Worth $25,000 Will Be on Exhibit Four Days - To Be Well Guarded - Both Are Realistic  
Two valuable paintings from the collection made by the late Adolphus Busch, loaned to Fort Worth through the courtesy of Edward A. Faust, who has them in charge, will arrive Monday.  Beginning Tuesday, they will be exhibited four days in the gallery at the Carnegie public library.  No charge will be made to view the pictures.  
The pictures are "The Immigrants" by Edward Farazyn, and "The Forest Fire" by A. K. Denisoff-Uralsky.  These pictures have excited the interest of thousands. They represent the art that portrays and interprets human interests, and appeals directly to sympathy and knowledge of life, rather than the "art of art's sake" that appeals purely to the esthetic sense.  
"Forest Fire" Realistic.
"The Forest Fire" was painted by A. K. Denisoff-Uralsky, a Russian artist, whose collection of seventy-two pictures, "The Urals and There Riches" was given large space at the St. Louis World's Fair.  In speaking of the picture to be shown in Fort Worth, F. A. E. Curley, curator of the St. Louis Art Museum said:  
"One felt there was no thought of beauty in the painting of this forest fire in the Russian Ural mountains.  The artist's idea was to make you feel the fire.  Such beauty as there might be in the scene would be of the kind that serpents flaunt before stricken birds.  Esthetic feeling certainly would not dominate the picture.  Sheer actuality is what the artist desired, and he knew his subject intimately."  
Other True to Life.
Farazyn, who painted "The Immigrants" also is a realistic.  Curator Curley has to say of this painting:  
"Very different indeed from the Russian's realistic picture is the painting of the busy scene that brings before us, with touches of comedy and tragedy and medley of incident, the drama of human life.  
"This scene is at the loading of a passenger ship at the dock in Antwerp, the great Belgian port, through which thousands pour out across the Atlantic to the new world.  It is indeed a human picture that Edward Farazyn has painted.  It is a moment fraught with hopes, fears, joys, even with despair, for some of the participants in the scene.  At such times the individual characteristics, the guiding motives of people, in the drama are dramatically revealed.  All this the artist has seen and painted."  
The pictures in actual measurements are immense.  Together they will cover a space 15x30 feet.  They are valued at $25,000 each and will be well guarded while in Fort Worth.  The picture will be brought here in a special car by a member of the firm Noonan & Kocian, art experts of St. Louis.
 
 
Other versions of this Iconic Image: