Newcastle,UK – The Laing Gallery hosts a major retrospective of the works of John Martin until June 5th 2011. Part of the Great British Art Debate, ‘John Martin: Heaven & Hell’ is the first major exhibition of the paintings by 19th century artist John Martin for more than 40 years. His spectacular, apocalyptic works are displayed at the Laing, capturing the drama and impact which they had when they were originally displayed. The exhibition is a comprehensive display of Martin’s apocalyptic works, bringing together his finest pieces from the Laing’s own collection, Tate and galleries from the UK and abroad. John Martin’s many influential works brought him huge popularity in his lifetime and his paintings have gone on to inspire film-makers, designers and artists in Europe and America.
John Martin was born in July 1789, at Haydon Bridge, near Hexham in Northumberland, the 4th son of Fenwick Martin, a one time 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 canceled, and he was placed instead under Bonifacio 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, and supported himself by giving drawing lessons, and by painting in watercolours, and on china and glass. Martin began to supplement his income by painting in oils, some landscapes, but more usually grand biblical themes inspired by the Old Testament. He was heavily influenced by his childhood experiences. His landscapes have the ruggedness of the Northumberland crags, while vast apocalyptic canvasses, like ‘The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah’ show his intimate familiarity with the forges and ironworks of the Tyne Valley as well as the words of the Old testament.
His timing could not have been better. In the years of the Regency from 1812 onwards there was a fashion for such ‘sublime’ paintings, encouraged by the publications of travellers returning from the Grand Tour or the Middle East with exotic tales of places like Ur and Babylon, Pompeii and Alexandria. Martin’s break came at the end of a season at the Royal Academy, where his first great biblical 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, a governor of the Bank of England. Manning wanted to buy it from him. Such influential patronage propelled Martin’s career onto a major stage though he was never, to his disgust, elected to the Royal Academy. This promising career was interrupted though, by the death of his father, mother, grandmother and young son – all in a single year. Another distraction was his brotehr, 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 Milton, he continued with his grand themes, despite a number of financial and artistic setbacks – one of his works was ruined while waiting to be hung at the Academy by a careless artist spilling a pot of dark varnish over it. In 1816 he finally achieved public acclaim with ‘Joshua’, an immense theme which struck a popular chord 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 more than £1000, he finally rid himself of debt and bought a house in Marylebone, where he came into contact with a wide range of artists, writers, scientists and Whig nobility. His 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, in a superb historical irony, nearly ruined when the carriage in which it was being transported was struck by a train at a level crossing near Oswestry in 1841, with John Martin himself on the footplate, Isambard Kingdom Brunel ran a train at 90 mph to disprove Stephenson’s theory that locomotives could not go faster than horses. In private Martin was passionate, a devotee of chess, swordsmanship and javelin-throwing as well as being a radical who won a reputation for hissing at the National Anthem in public. Nevertheless, he was courted by royalty and presented with several gold medals, one of them from the Russian Tsar Nicholas, 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 who later became the first King of Belgium, where he constructed Europe’s first major railway. Leopold was the godfather of Martin’s son Leopold, and endowed Martin with one of Belgium’s first knighthoods, 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, and his highly intelligent wife Susan were warm and affectionate friends to many, but he was also a passionate defender of deism, evolution (before Darwin) and rationality. Georges Cuvier, the great French naturalist, became an admirer of Martin’s, and he increasingly enjoyed the company of scientists, artists and writers – Dickens, Faraday and Turner among them. He 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 were radical and among his friends were counted William Godwin, the ageing reformed revolutionist, husband of Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley; and John Hunt, co-founder of The Examiner.
A great number of Martin’s works survive in collections: the Laing art gallery in Newcastle – which also holds his famous ‘black cabinet’ of projects in progress; the Tate, the Victoria and Albert museum, and elsewhere in Europe and the USA. The RIBA holds many of his exquisite engineering drawings. There are letters in private collections and many of his papers are kept at Queen Mary College in London. The art critic William Feaver wrote an acclaimed, and now expensively rare artistic biography of him in the 1970s. Other biographies include that of Mary Pendered whose chief source, Martin’s friend Sergeant Ralph Thomas, wrote a diary – now lost – of their relationship. A major source for his life is a series of reminiscences by his son Leopold, published in sixteen parts in the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle in 1889. There are a number of surviving letters and reminiscences by, among others, B.R. Haydon, John Constable, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Rossettis, Benjamin Disraeli, Charlotte Brontë and John Ruskin – a persistent critic who, even so, admitted Martin’s uniqueness of vision. John Martin’s influence survived in perhaps curious places. One of his few followers was Thomas Cole, founder of American landscape painting. Others whose imaginations were fired by him included Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Brontës, the pre-Raphaelites (especially Rossetti), and several generations of movie-makers, from DW Griffiths, who borrowed his Babylon from Martin, to Cecil B de Mille and George Lucas. Writers like Rider Haggard, Jules Verne and HG Wells were influenced by his concept of the sublime. The French Romantic movement, in both art and literature, was inspired by him. Much Victorian railway architecture was copied from his motifs, including his friend Brunel’s Clifton suspension bridge. Martin’s engineering plans for London which included a circular connecting railway, though they failed to be built in his lifetime, all came to fruition later. This would have pleased him inordinately – he admitted he would rather have been an engineer than painter. John Martin died on the Isle of Man in 1854. He is buried in Kirk Braddon cemetery.
After falling out of fashion after his death, John Martin’s star is again on the rise, the Laing exhibition, “John Martin: Heaven & Hell” will travel on to Sheffield before being shown at the Tate Gallery in london. The Laing is home to an impressive collection of art and sculpture and its exhibition programme is renowned for bringing the biggest names in historic, modern and contemporary art to the North East. The Gallery has a packed programme of free events which include gallery talks, family activities and artists’ events. The impressive permanent collection can be enjoyed throughout the season with dynamic landscapes by John Martin and sculpture by Henry Moore. There are events throughout the year including talks from leading contemporary artists and fun activities for families. Many of these events, like the gallery, are free of charge. The Gallery also has a shop and cafe. The Laing Art Gallery is managed by Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums on behalf of Newcastle City Council. Visit the Laing Gallery’s website at … www.twmuseums.org.uk/laing