John Martin (painter)
John Martin was an English Romanticist painter, engraver, and illustrator. He was known for his typically vast and dramatic paintings of religious subjects and fantastic compositions, populated with minute figures placed in imposing landscapes. Martin's paintings, and the prints made from them, enjoyed great success with the general public, with Thomas Lawrence referring to him as "the most popular painter of his day". He was also criticized by John Ruskin and other critics.
Early life
Martin was born in July 1789 in a one-room cottage, at Haydon Bridge, near Hexham in Northumberland, North East England. He was the fourth son of Fenwick Martin, former fencing master. He was apprenticed by his father to a coachbuilder in Newcastle upon Tyne to learn heraldic painting, but owing to a dispute over wages the indentures were cancelled, and he was placed instead under Boniface Musso, an Italian artist, father of the enamel painter Charles Muss.With his master, Martin moved from Newcastle to London in 1806, where he married at the age of nineteen. He supported himself by giving drawing lessons, and by painting in watercolours, as well as on china and glass — his only surviving painted plate is now in a private collection in England. In his leisure time, he studied perspective and architecture.
His brothers were William, the eldest, an inventor; Richard, a tanner who became a soldier in the Northumberland Fencibles in 1798, rising to the rank of Quartermaster Sergeant in the Grenadier Guards and fought in the Peninsular War and at Waterloo; and Jonathan, a preacher tormented by madness who set fire to York Minster in 1829, for which he stood trial.
Beginnings as artist
Martin began to supplement his income by painting sepia watercolours. He sent his first oil painting to the Royal Academy in 1810, but it was not hung. In 1811 he sent the painting once again, when it was hung under the title A Landscape Composition as item no.46 in the Great Room. Thereafter, he produced a succession of large exhibited oil paintings: some landscapes, but more usually grand biblical themes inspired by the Old Testament. His landscapes have the ruggedness of the Northumberland crags, while some authors claim that his apocalyptic canvasses, such as The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, show his familiarity with the forges and ironworks of the Tyne Valley and display his intimate knowledge of the Old Testament.In the years of the Regency from 1812 onwards there was a fashion for such 'sublime' paintings. Martin's first break came at the end of a season at the Royal Academy, where his first major sublime canvas Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion had been hung—and ignored. He brought it home, only to find there a visiting card from William Manning MP, who wanted to buy it from him. Patronage propelled Martin's career.
This promising career was interrupted by the deaths of his father, mother, grandmother and young son in a single year. Another distraction was William, who frequently asked him to draw up plans for his inventions, and whom he always indulged with help and money. But, heavily influenced by the works of John Milton, he continued with his grand themes despite setbacks. In 1816 Martin finally achieved public acclaim with Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still upon Gibeon, even though it broke many of the conventional rules of composition. In 1818, on the back of the sale of the Fall of Babylon for £420, he finally rid himself of debt and bought a house in Marylebone, where he came into contact with artists, writers, scientists and Whig nobility.
Painter of repute
Martin's triumph was Belshazzar's Feast, of which he boasted beforehand, "it shall make more noise than any picture ever did before... only don't tell anyone I said so." Five thousand people paid to see it. It was later nearly ruined when the carriage in which it was being transported was struck by a train at a level crossing near Oswestry.In private, Martin was passionate and devoted to chess, and, like his brothers, to swordsmanship and javelin-throwing. He was also a devout Christian, believing in natural religion. Despite an often cited singular instance of his hissing at the national anthem, he was courted by royalty and presented with several gold medals, one of them from the future Russian Tsar Nicholas I, on whom a visit to Wallsend colliery on Tyneside had made an unforgettable impression: "My God," he had cried, "it is like the mouth of Hell." Martin became the official historical painter to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, later the first King of Belgium. Leopold was the godfather of Martin's son Leopold, and endowed Martin with the Order of Leopold. Martin frequently had early morning visits from another Saxe-Coburg, Prince Albert, who would engage him in banter from his horse—Martin standing in the doorway still in his dressing gown—at seven o'clock in the morning. Martin was a defender of deism and natural religion, evolution and rationality. Georges Cuvier became an admirer of Martin's, and he increasingly enjoyed the company of scientists, artists and writers—Charles Dickens, Michael Faraday and J. M. W. Turner among them. Between 1849 and 1853, Martin took a home near Turner in Chelsea, London.
Martin began to experiment with mezzotint technology, and as a result was commissioned to produce 24 engravings for a new edition of Paradise Lost—perhaps the definitive illustrations of Milton's masterpiece, of which copies now fetch many hundreds of pounds. Politically his sympathies are not clear; some claim he was a radical, but this is not borne out by known facts, although he knew William Godwin, the ageing reformed revolutionist, husband of Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley; and John Hunt, co-founder of The Examiner.
At one time the Martins took under their wing a young woman called Jane Webb, who at twenty produced The Mummy! a socially optimistic but satirical vision of a steam-driven world in the 22nd century. Another friend was Charles Wheatstone, professor of physics at King's College, London. Wheatstone experimented with telegraphy and invented the concertina and stereoscope; Martin was fascinated by his attempts to measure the speed of light. Accounts of Martin's evening parties reveal an astonishing array of thinkers, eccentrics and social movers; one witness was a young John Tenniel—later the illustrator of Lewis Carroll's work—who was heavily influenced by Martin and was a close friend of his children. At various points Martin's brothers were also among the guests, their eccentricities and conversation adding to the already exotic flavour of the fare.
Paintings
His first exhibited subject picture, Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion, was hung in the Ante-room of the Royal Academy in 1812, and sold for fifty guineas. The piece depicts a scene from the Tales of Two Genii. It was followed by the Expulsion, Adam's First Sight of Eve, Clytie, Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still upon Gibeon and The Fall of Babylon. In 1820 appeared his Belshazzar's Feast, which excited much favourable and hostile comment, and was awarded a prize of £200 at the British Institution, where the Joshua had previously carried off a premium of £100. Then came The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, The Creation, The Eve of the Deluge, and a series of other Biblical and imaginative subjects. The Plains of Heaven is thought by some to reflect his memories of the Allendale of his youth.Martin's large paintings were closely connected with contemporary dioramas or panoramas, popular entertainments in which large painted cloths were displayed, and animated by the skilful use of artificial light. Martin has often been claimed as a forerunner of the epic cinema, and there is no doubt that the pioneer director D. W. Griffith was aware of his work." In turn, the diorama makers borrowed Martin's work, to the point of plagiarism. A version of Belshazzar's Feast was mounted at a facility called the British Diorama in 1833; Martin tried, but failed, to shut down the display with a court order. Another diorama of the same picture was staged in New York City in 1835. These dioramas were tremendous successes with their audiences, but wounded Martin's reputation in the serious art world. The painting The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, 1852 is currently at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne.
Following their exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1841, Pandæmonium, picturing a scene from Paradise Lost, and The Celestial City and the River of Bliss were bought by civil and mechanical engineer Benjamin Hick. After Hick's death, in 1842, the two paintings were auctioned by Thomas Winstanley & Sons of Liverpool at the Exchange Gallery in Manchester, in February 1843. Pandæmonium and its frame designed by Martin can be seen at the Louvre.