John Martin is best known for his dark, dramatic paintings of huge biblical landscapes and cityscapes. These amazingly detailed compositions are full of fire and brimstone and they tell of war and plague, death and destruction. There is fire, bolts of lightning, boiling lava, winged beings and a myriad of tiny figures writhing around in agony in the dirt.
He was born in Haydon bridge, Northumberland in 1789 to a poor family living in a one room cottage. He started his career at the age if fourteen when he studied heraldic painting as a coachbuilders apprentice. He then went on to paint china and studied glassmaking, it was at this time, aged nineteen that he painted his first oil painting, a landscape composition.
His next painting in 1812 titled 'Sadak in search of the waters of oblivion' based on the Persian themed story, it shows an exhausted man dragging himself across a nightmarish rocky terrain.
He went on to be hugely popular and also started to work with etching and printmaking, of particular importance was his illustrations for Milton's paradise lost and The Bible. It has been said that he was the equivalent of Damien Hurst in his day.
I could write all about his life but many people have done that, if you want more info go see his wiki page.
This painting is called 'Pandemonium' from 1841. It depicts the capital city of Hell as told in Milton's 'Paradise Lost'.
Looks a bit like the Houses of Parliament on the river Thames in London doesn't it?
Here we have the painting 'Deluge' from 1834. It is a representation God punishing mankind for its wickedness by destroying almost all life with a
great flood. It's said he drew inspiration from Lord Byron's drama Heaven & Earth. When it was shown at the Paris Salon in 1835, the painting was awarded a gold medal by King Louis-Philippe.
I was lucky enough to see some of these paintings at an exhibition in Sheffield in 2011 and they are even better in the flesh. The amount of detail in each one is mind-blowing, you just see more and more things the longer you look at them, and most of them really do carry a deep, dark sense of doom on a biblical scale.
John Martin painted like no one else and turned out a large body of work during his life. In the last four years of his life he was engaged in a trilogy of large paintings of biblical subjects: The Last Judgment, The Great Day of His Wrath (above), and The Plains of Heaven. They were completed in 1853, just before his death.
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