The Fire at the Old Drury Lane Theatre, seen from Pimlico

The Fire at the Old Drury Lane Theatre, seen from Pimlico is an oil on canvas by the English landscape painter Abraham Pether, signed and dated 'APether pix / 1809' at lower left; it is one of two versions he painted of the scene and was offered at Christie's London in 2019.

On the night of 24 February 1809 the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, which its owner Richard Brinsley Sheridan had rebuilt in 1794 with the architect Henry Holland, burned down; The Times called it the most serious such event since the Great Fire of London. Sheridan was in Parliament when the fire broke out and hurried to the scene, then, finding nothing could be done, is said to have sat in a coffee house opposite with a bottle of port, remarking that a man may surely be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside.

Pether, nicknamed 'Moonlight Pether', made his reputation with night scenes, often combining moonlight and firelight, and exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1784 to 1811; his scientific interests meant that the astronomical conditions in his moonlit pictures were carefully observed. Here the distant fire sends a column of flame into the sky at left while the moon breaks through clouds at right above a twin-towered Gothic building on the skyline. According to Christie's, the view is taken from Cowbridge in Pimlico looking north, and the water in the foreground is not the Thames but part of the River Tyburn, now running underground, so the picture records a lost view of London. The catalogue compares the competing light sources to the fire-and-moon effects of Joseph Wright of Derby.

The canvas measures 72 by 103.8 cm. Its companion version, about 74 by 107 cm, has been in the Guildhall Art Gallery in the City of London since 1893. This one was sold at Christie's London in 1984, passed through Timothy Langston Fine Art and Mallett in London around 2007, and was sold again at Dreweatts in 2015 before Christie's Old Masters Day Sale of July 2019.