John Martin

February 23, 2021 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | ART | 0 Comments |

"Pandemonium'

(19 July 1789 – 17 February 1854)

The great romantic painter of startling tableaux of the Apocalypse, John Martin passed from glazing plates to classical landscape painting until he found his mileu in fire and brimstone.  Stories of the Old and New Testaments were his templates, and the vast (or small) canvasses and plates of destruction, panic and woe were wildly successful, although now out of fashion (for now).

File:Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum.jpg

“The Destruction of Pompei and Herculaneum” (c. 1821)

Below the rational and sensuous surface of nineteenth-century painting, the bright skin of Impressionism, the solid material world of Courbet, or, further back, the ideal forms of neo-classicism, there ran a fascination with dreams: with mystery, melancholy, and fear. It was a world of phantoms, and all the more vivid for not being the conscious emanations of a culture like ours; in 1820, an oneiric image had to have more pressure behind it to break through the crust of normal artistic usage than it does today.”*

“The Deluge” (1834)

Image result for john martin painter

“The Fall of Babylon” (1835)

File:JoshuaSun Martin.jpg

“Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still upon Gibeon” (c. 1840)

Image result for john martin painter

“Belshazzar’s Feast” (c. 1821)

Image result for john martin painter

“Fall of Ninevah” (and also below, in Mezzotint)

File:The art Bible, comprising the Old and new Testaments - with numerous illustrations (1896) (14782678202).jpg

“Manfred and the Alpine Witch” (1837)

Martin “assimilated the dramatic effects and even the architecture of industrialism, and used them as the basis of his illustrations to Milton and the Bible. His panoramas of Satan’s Kingdom, vaster and more sinister than the film sets of D. W. Griffith, were a genuine development of the contemporary style, and he was the first to see the importance to the early nineteenth-century imagination of the tunnel.” ^

“Bridge of Chaos” (1824–1827)

File:The art Bible, comprising the Old and new Testaments - with numerous illustrations (1896) (14782933852).jpg

“The Destruction Of Sodom And Gomorrah” (1852)

John Martin - The Great Day of His Wrath - Google Art Project.jpg

“The Great Day of His Wrath” (1851-1853)

Martin, John - Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion - 1812.jpg

“Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion” (1812)

Image result for john martin painter

“The Seventh Plague” (1823)

Image result for john martin painter

“The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise” (1823-27)

File:John Martin - The Last Judgement - Google Art Project.jpg

“The Last Judgement” (1853)

Image result for john martin painter

[* Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (1980), p. 215.] [^ Kenneth Clark, Civilisation (1969), p. 324.]

0 Comments


Leave a comment...

While your email address is required to post a comment, it will NOT be published.

Leave a Reply

© Copyright 2014 The Varnished Culture All Rights Reserved. TVC Disclaimer. Site by KWD&D.