John Martin

John Martin (19 July 1789 – 17 February 1854) was an English Romantic painter, engraver and illustrator. His large and dramatic canvases usually depicted religious subjects and fantastic compositions, with minute figures placed in imposing landscapes. His work enjoyed great success with the general public, and the prints made from his paintings spread his fame further. He matters because he gave a powerful visual form to the Romantic idea of the sublime, and because his spectacular imagery influenced literature, illustration and later popular entertainment.

Early years in Newcastle and London

Martin was born in a one-room cottage at Haydon Bridge, near Hexham in Northumberland, in the north-east of England. He was the fourth son of Fenwick Martin, a former fencing master. His father first apprenticed him to a coachbuilder in Newcastle upon Tyne so that he could learn heraldic painting, but a dispute over wages brought the indentures to an end, and the young man was placed instead under Boniface Musso, an Italian artist who worked in the painting of china. In 1806 he moved with his master to London, where he married at the age of nineteen. To support himself he gave drawing lessons and painted in watercolour, and also on china and glass. In his spare time he studied perspective and architecture, subjects that would later shape his compositions.

First oils and the Royal Academy

Martin began to supplement his income with sepia watercolours. He sent his first oil painting to the Royal Academy in 1810, but it was not hung. The following year he submitted it again, and this time it was shown under the title A Landscape Composition in the Academy's Great Room. From then on he produced a series of large oil paintings for exhibition: some were landscapes, but more often they were grand biblical scenes drawn from the Old Testament. His first major sublime canvas, Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion, attracted little notice when it was shown in the ante-room and was sold for fifty guineas. According to one account, when he returned home he found a visiting card from the MP William Manning, who wanted to buy it. His career then gathered pace, although the deaths of his father, mother, grandmother and a young son within a single year interrupted his progress.

Fame with biblical subjects and Belshazzar's Feast

In 1816 Martin finally won public acclaim with Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still upon Gibeon, a picture that broke many of the conventional rules of composition. That same period brought The Fall of Babylon, which sold for £420 and allowed him to clear his debts and, in 1818, to buy a house in Marylebone. There he came into contact with artists, writers, scientists and members of the Whig nobility. In 1820 he exhibited Belshazzar's Feast, the work that made his reputation. Beforehand he boasted that it would make more noise than any picture before it. Five thousand people paid to see it, and the British Institution awarded it a prize of £200, while Joshua had earned one of £100. Later came The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum (1822), The Creation (1824), The Eve of the Deluge (1840) and a series of other biblical and imaginative subjects.

Style: landscape, impossible architecture and light

Martin's paintings combine vast landscapes with fantastic architecture: terraces, bridges and cities that dissolve into the distance. His figures are tiny against nature and catastrophe, so the viewer feels overwhelmed by space. Some writers have suggested that his landscapes recall the rugged crags of Northumberland, and that his apocalyptic scenes, such as The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, may reflect the forges and ironworks of the Tyne Valley that he knew well. During the Regency years, from 1812 onwards, there was a strong fashion for these sublime pictures, and Martin exploited it with compositions of great visual impact and dramatic lighting.

Dioramas, spectacle and plagiarism

Martin's largest paintings were closely linked to the dioramas and panoramas of the period, popular entertainments in which large painted cloths were shown under artificial light and sometimes seemed to move. For this reason he is often regarded as a forerunner of epic cinema, and the pioneer director D. W. Griffith was almost certainly aware of his work. The makers of dioramas, however, borrowed his images so freely that the practice can be considered plagiarism. A version of Belshazzar's Feast measuring about 190 square metres was mounted at the British Diorama in 1833, and Martin tried without success to close the display with a court order. Another diorama of the same picture was staged in New York City in 1835. These spectacles were enormously popular with audiences, but they damaged Martin's standing in the serious art world.

Engraver and the illustrations of Paradise Lost

As well as a painter, Martin was a notable mezzotint engraver, and for some periods of his life he earned more from his prints than from his paintings. In 1823 the publisher Samuel Prowett commissioned him to illustrate John Milton's Paradise Lost, for which he was paid 2,000 guineas. Before the first 24 engravings were finished, he received a further 1,500 guineas for a second set of 24 engravings on smaller plates. Among the most notable prints are Pandaemonium and Satan Presiding at the Infernal Council, remarkable for the science-fiction architecture it shows, and arguably his most dramatic composition, Bridge over Chaos. Prowett issued four separate editions in monthly instalments, the first appearing on 20 March 1825 and the last in 1827. Inspired by Prowett's venture, Martin published his own illustrations for the Old Testament between 1831 and 1835, but the project drained his resources and was not profitable. He sold the remaining stock to Charles Tilt, who republished the prints in 1838 and again in 1839.

Engineering schemes and family life

Between 1827 and 1828 Martin turned away from painting to pursue engineering projects. He became absorbed by London's water supply and sewage problems, and published pamphlets and plans on the metropolitan water supply, drainage, docks and railways. His proposals included an embankment along the Thames containing a central drainage system. His 1834 plans for London's sewerage anticipated by some twenty-five years the scheme later put forward by Joseph Bazalgette. Family life was also central to him. With his wife Susan, née Garrett, who was nine years older than him, he had six children who reached adulthood. Alfred worked with him as a mezzotint engraver, and Charles was trained as a painter by his father, copying many of his works before becoming a portrait painter. His brother Jonathan, troubled by madness, set fire to York Minster in 1829, and John Martin paid for his defence at trial.

Last years and legacy

Debt, family pressures and the suicide of a nephew brought on a depression that was at its worst in 1838. From 1839 his fortunes recovered, and he exhibited many works in the 1840s. In his final years he worked on a trilogy of large biblical paintings, The Last Judgment, The Great Day of His Wrath and The Plains of Heaven, completed in 1853, just before a stroke paralysed his right side. He never recovered and died at Douglas on the Isle of Man in 1854. His influence was considerable. Thomas Cole, founder of American landscape painting, was one of his followers, and the Brontë sisters admired him. The Pre-Raphaelites, especially Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and writers such as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells were drawn to his concept of the sublime. After his death, however, changing Victorian tastes left his work neglected, and it was only in the twentieth century that it was again appreciated.