^
Died on 17 February 1854: John
Martin, British painter born on 19 July 1789.
— John Martin was born at Haydon Bridge, near Hexham, Northumberland.
After a struggling youth in London (from 1806) as an heraldric and enamel
painter, in 1812 he exhibited at the Royal Academy the first of his grandiose
Biblical paintings, such as The Fall of Babylon (1819), Belshazzar's
Feast (1821) and The Deluge (1826). The rediscovery of John
Martin was launched by two refugees from Nazi Germany, Robert and Charlotte
Frank, who set up as dealers in St James's, London.
— Martin was largely a self-taught artist, who achieved through his
vivid imagination and bold, theatrical style an epitome of the romantic
sublime in landscape painting that proved highly influential. Born in East
Landends near Haydon Bridge on the Tyne River, he moved with his family
to Newcastle in 1803 and there received some slight training from the Italian
painter Boniface Musso.
In 1806 Martin went to London and during
the next five or six years supported himself as a painter on porcelain and
glass. His earliest exhibits at the Royal Academy and British Institution
in 1812-14, however, marked the emergence of an original talent, and he
quickly gained fame for his vast, densely detailed scenes of tumult and
disaster. So audacious were some of his visions that he received the nickname
"Mad Martin."
A lifelong foe of the academy, Martin was
one of its most bitter critics in parliamentary hearings on the academy
in 1836. In the 1820s, Martin turned his attention to engravings and mezzotints,
partly as a way of reaching a larger audience, and his illustrations of
Paradise Lost and the Bible proved particularly popular. He also worked
as an inventor and pamphleteer and proposed a number of ideas for public
works. In France, Martin's name became synonymous with the sublime, and
his work formed a direct link to the US landscape tradition of Thomas
Cole, Washington
Allston, and Frederic
Church.
— LINKS
— The
Assuaging of the Waters (1840, 143x218cm)
— Manfred
and the Witch of the Alps (1837, 39x56cm) _ The eponymous hero of Byron's
verse drama Manfred (1817) is a Faustian figure who, tormented
by guilt for 'some half-maddening sin' and cursed by the spirits of the
universe, is denied the oblivion he seeks. After an attempt at suicide —
illustrated by Martin in a companion watercolor ) — Manfred invokes
the Witch of the Alps and reveals his sin, his incestuous love for his sister
Astarte. The Witch, who 'rises beneath the arch of the rainbow of the torrent',
commands him to surrender his soul to her as the price for her assistance:
the shadowy apparition to the right in this watercolor is his soul, with
which he considers parting, but refuses to do so.
Painted at a time of emotional and financial
crisis in Martin's life when he told a friend that he felt a 'ruined, crushed
man ... there are no more bright days for me', this watercolor shows both
his astonishing technique and his identification with Byron's doomed, romantic
hero.
— The
Great Day of His Wrath (1853) — 53
prints at FAMSF
— The
Bard(1817, 270x170cm) _ The subject comes from Thomas
Gray's poem The
Bard (1755) and had been popular throughout the Romantic period,
with versions by Thomas Jones, William
Blake and Henry
Fuseli. Gray [links]
tells how Edward I, after his conquest of Wales, ordered all bards to be
slaughtered in order to draw the people's cultural and nationalistic sting:
The sole surviving bard here stands:
'On a rock, whose haughty brow
Frowns o'er old Conways foaming flood,
Robed in the sable garb of woe,
With haggard eyes the Poet stood;
(Loose his beard and hoary hair
Stream'd, like a meteor, to the troubled air)
(II. 15-20)
He curses the departing armies:
'Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!
Confusion on thy banners wait'
(II. 1-2)
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