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Martin was born near Hexham, Northumberland. He was apprenticed first to an heraldic coach painter in Newcastle, and then to a china painter with whom he came to London in 1806. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1811, and at the British Institution, where he won premiums in 1817 and 1821. He designed various urban improvements for London, and painted some landscapes of the Thames Valley. He became paralysed in 1853 and died in Douglas, Isle of Man.
Martin is best-known as a painter of religious subjects and fantastic compositions. His paintings, typically vast landscapes and cityscapes peopled with a myriad of tiny figures, enjoyed great success, as did the engravings made from them. Among his principal pictures are Belshazzar's Feast (Tate Gallery T04896), The Last Judgement (Tate Gallery T01927), The Plains of Heaven (Tate Gallery T01928) and The Great Day of His Wrath (Tate Gallery N05613). Several of these were engraved by Martin himself. The engravings of The Deluge (1837) and two others were presented by the French Academy to Louis Phillippe who ordered a special medal to be struck and sent to Martin as a token of esteem. After the Belgian government bought The Fall of Ninevah, the Belgian Academy made Martin a member and the King of Belgium created him a Knight of the Order of Leopold.
Further
reading:
William Feaver, The Art of John Martin, Oxford 1975
Terry Riggs
November 1997
Wikipedia entry
John Martin (19 July 1789 – 17 February 1854) was an English Romantic painter, engraver and illustrator. He was celebrated for his typically vast and melodramatic 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—in 1821 Thomas Lawrence referred to him as "the most popular painter of his day"—but were lambasted by John Ruskin and other critics.
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Read full Wikipedia entryArtworks
John Martin The Destruction of Pompei and Herculaneum
1822, restored 2011
John Martin The Plains of Heaven
1851–3
Formerly attributed to John Martin The Fallen Angels Entering Pandemonium, from ‘Paradise Lost’, Book 1
?exhibited 1841
John Martin Plate from ‘Illustrations to the Bible’: The Covenant
published 1832
Film and audio
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Landscape and Eschatology: Part 2
This conference brings together a range of high profile artists and researchers to discuss the lasting cultural legacies of John ...
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Landscape and Eschatology: Part 1
This conference brings together a range of high profile artists and researchers to discuss the lasting cultural legacies of John ...
TateShots
John Martin: Curatorial walkthrough
Called the father of modern cinema, his epic paintings of apocalyptic destruction were the blockbusters of their time
TateShots
Ray Harryhausen on John Martin
Discover how a nineteenth-century British painter inspired a film legend
Features
Art Term
Sublime
Theory developed by Edmund Burke in the mid eighteenth century, where he defined sublime art as art that refers to ...
Tate Etc
Hellfire, damnation... and pudding: John Martin
The celebrated New Zealand chef Peter Gordon creates a novel recipe inspired – unexpectedly – by John Martin's apocalyptic painting The ...
Tate Etc
Tate Etc. issue 30: Spring 2014
Online edition of Tate's magazine featuring Richard Deacon, Henri Matisse, Richard Hamilton and more, published 15 January 2014
Blog
Tate Debate: Films, music, art - what has best depicted the apocalypse?
With the John Martin exhibition on at Tate Britain, we've been looking at apocalyptic visions.
Blog
John Martin: Art (and films, and games) after the end of the world
I spotted a couple of weeks back that in putting 'the month's pop culture images through a high-art blender ...
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