Born in Haydon Bridge, Northumberland, John Martin trained under the Italian artist Boniface Musso in Newcastle before moving with his teacher and settling in London in 1806. There, he was employed as a glass and china painter in a factory. Martin also taught a variety of artistic mediums and made watercolors and wash drawings for sale before moving on to oil paintings of literary and historical subjects. The artist began exhibiting a series of large oil paintings at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1812, including Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion, and continued with other apocalyptic paintings such as The Fall of Babylon (1819), Belshazzar’s Feast (1821), The Seventh Plague of Egypt (1824), and The Deluge (1826).1 In these grand oil paintings, Martin shows his proclivity for drama, and in particular, diminutive figures in immense sublime landscapes. However, the drawings and watercolors from earlier in his career show that he had previously devised this scheme, though on a smaller scale. His internationally celebrated reputation aided in his appointment as historical landscape painter to Prince Leopold (later King of Belgium) and Princess Charlotte in 1816–17. It was also enhanced by the popularity of Martin’s prints. He launched his printmaking career about 1824 and specialized in mezzotint. The artist personally designed and engraved more than a hundred prints in the 1820s and early 1830s to illustrate important tomes, such as the Bible and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, making him one of the most important and successful printmakers of the nineteenth century. In the 1830s and 1840s, while developing engineering plans for clean water and sewage disposal systems for London, Martin returned to painting cataclysmic imagery.
Throughout his career, Martin created monochromatic sepia or gray wash drawings of landscapes, often with minute figures in narratives drawn from literature or myths, that were popularly collected. In 1822 European Magazine reported that Martin “employed his evenings in some romantic designs, generally made in Sepia,” and he was quoted in his obituary as stating, “I had been so successful with my sepia drawings, that the Bishop of Salisbury . . . advised me not to risk my reputation by attempting a large picture.”2
Inspired by the famed tale in the tenth book of Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Ovid (3 BC–AD 17/18), this elaborate sepia watercolor illustrates the demise of Adonis, Aphrodite’s mortal lover, who was wounded by a wild boar while hunting and bled to death in the arms of the weeping goddess. As the story recounts, his blood, coalescing with her tears, fell to the ground and gave life to an anemone flower. Anticipating this moment of poetic tragedy, a swooning Aphrodite springs toward Adonis’s splayed body, her urgency reflected in her outstretched arms and windswept garb. Adonis, writhing in a pool of his own blood, widens his mouth in agony while directing his chilled gaze toward the viewer. His killer flees diagonal to him, scurrying into the woods under the cover of heavy shadow. Adonis’s hounds appear beside their master; as one joins him in death, the other lets out a grief-stricken howl.
The composition presents a densely crafted woodland that dwarfs the classical figures; the prominence of the trees is characteristic of Martin’s romantic landscapes in monochrome watercolor. A matrix of gnarled oaks makes up the paradisiacal treescape. Martin used the bare paper’s white tone to delineate the trunk’s bark, branches, leaves, and roots. This florid articulation of natural elements took root in Martin’s earlier oil paintings, like The Hermit (1816) and The Bard (1817).3 His interest in trees is also visible in his first commercial publication, Characters of Trees, which consists of seven etchings showcasing different types of trees on each page, stitched into a paper wrapper and advertised as a “drawing book” by the publisher Rudolph Ackerman.4 Throughout Martin’s Paradise Lost mezzotint series (1824–27), he uses the white of the paper surrounding the darker branches and leaves to great effect, as seen in Paradise with the Approach of the Archangel Raphael, Satan Tempting Eve, Adam Hearing the Voice of the Almighty, and Eve Presenting the Forbidden Fruit to Adam (small plate). The melodrama and extravagance of Martin’s landscapes paired well with the technical freedom of watercolor; as a result, he turned to the medium regularly when designing reference compositions for engravings in the 1820s and 1830s.
Martin produced a number of comparable watercolors between 1818 and 1821; given their similarity to Landscape with Adonis and Aphrodite in their handling, content, and rather identical size, they likely were assembled as a grouping of classical tales. Among these works are Classical Warrior Defending His Family from Wolves, Classical Warrior with His Family, and Glaucus and Scylla.5 These scenes, with sprawling, fanciful landscapes, demonstrate Martin’s emphatic embrace of the sublime—an aesthetic philosophy popularized by Edmund Burke (1730–1797) with his 1756 publication A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. —Dena M. Woodall
Notes
1. Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion, 1812, oil on canvas, Saint Louis Art Museum, Friends Fund [1566:1983]; The Fall of Babylon, 1819, oil on canvas, private collection, see Martin Myrone, ed., John Martin: Apocalypse (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 97–98, cat. 27; Belshazzar’s Feast, 1821, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut; The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, 1821, oil on canvas, Tate Britain, London; The Seventh Plague of Egypt, 1823, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and The Deluge, 1826, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut.
2. “Memoirs of John Martin Esq,” European Magazine (September 1822): 196, and “John Martin,” Athenaeum, February 25, 1854, 246–47.
3. See John Martin, The Hermit or Edwin and Angelina, 1816, oil on canvas, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne. Two other versions of The Hermit, also commonly titled Edwin and Angelina, are known: one unsigned and undated version sold at Christie’s, London, on November 24, 2014, lot 5, and another, larger version, presumably of similar design, was exhibited at the British Institution in 1843. John Martin, The Bard, 1817, oil on canvas, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne. A reduced version of The Bard belongs to the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
4. See J. Dustin Wees and Michael J. Campbell, Darkness Visible: The Prints of John Martin (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 1987), 10–11, cat. 2.
5. Thanks to Michael Campbell for his initial research and writing on this drawing. See John Martin, Classical Warrior Defending His Family from Wolves, c. 1818–21, sepia watercolor, British Museum, London; John Martin, Classical Warrior with His Family, c. 1818–21, sepia watercolor, British Museum, London; and, John Martin, Glaucus and Scylla, c. 1820, watercolor and graphite, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Arlington.
Landscape with Adonis and Aphrodite
Balston, Thomas. John Martin, 1789–1854: His Life and Works. London: G. Duckworth, 1947.
Campbell, Michael J. John Martin—Visionary Printmaker. York, England: Campbell Fine Art / York City Art Gallery, 1992.
Campbell, Michael J., and J. Dustin Wees. Darkness Visible: The Prints of John Martin. Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 1996.
Evans, Mark, et al. The Romantic Tradition in British Painting, 1800–1950: Masterpieces from the Victoria and Albert Museum. Tokyo: Brain Trust, 2002.
Feaver, William, and Nerys Johnson. John Martin, 1789–1854: Artist, Reformer, Engineer. Newcastle upon Tyne: Laing Art Gallery, 1970.
Myrone, Martin. John Martin: Apocalypse. London: Tate Publishing, 2011.
Myrone, Martin, ed. John Martin: Sketches of My Life. London: Tate Publishing, 2011.
Postle, Martin. “John Martin: Newcastle and London.” Burlington Magazine 154, no. 1, 308 (March 2012): 209–10.
Walker, Michael. “John Martin: Visionary Artist.” Journal of the Brontë Society 30, no. 1 (2005): 53–60.
ProvenancePrivate collection, UK; [sale, Holloway’s Auctioneers, Bambury, Antiques and Fine Art, February 28, 2018, lot 332]; [Andrew Clayton-Payne & Co., Ltd., London], 2018; purchased by MFAH, 2018.