Martin, JOHN

Martin, JOHN, painter, was born at Haydon Bridge, near Hexham, Northumberland, 19th July 1789. In 1806 he went up to London, in 1808 married, and, after a struggling youth as an heraldic and enamel painter, in 1812 exhibited 'Sadak in search of the Waters of Oblivion' at the Royal Academy, with which body he soon afterwards quarrelled. It was the first of his sixteen 'sublime' works, whose 'immeasurable spaces, innumerable multitudes, and gorgeous prodigies of architecture and landscape' divided the suffrage of the many between Martin and Turner; Bulwer-Lytton indeed pronounced him 'more original, more self-dependent' than Raphael and Michael Angelo! Even yet their memory is kept lurid by the coloured engravings of the 'Fall of Babylon' (1819), 'Belshazzar's Feast' (1821), 'The Deluge' (1826), &c. For twenty-seven years Martin had also been busied with projects for the improvement of London, and for four had been working on four pictures illustrative of the 'Last Judgment,' when he died at Douglas, in the Isle of Man, 17th February 1854.