John Martin

Another long piece... but it's always good to give a local lad some publicity - two in this case, since the writer, William Fever, art critic and author of the book, Pitmen Painters, taught art and history at the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle.

John Martin: painting the apocalypse
Martin, the most popular painter of his day, specialised in vast canvases of the ancient world in chaos. Neglected for decades, his spectacular art is regarded highly once more

William Feaver
guardian.co.uk
Thursday 8 September 2011 09.00

On the night of 1 February 1829, Jonathan Martin felt his way from behind Archbishop Greenfield's effigy in the north transept of York Minster. "All was darkness: I could not see my hands before me," he later told the court. Using bell ropes as an improvised rope ladder, he clambered into the choir, prayed awhile, gathered hassocks and selected books into piles and set them alight. "I thought it a work of merit to burn prayer-books and music books," he explained, "but not to burn the Word of God."

Around eight the following morning flames burst through the roof. Horrific though the scene was, the people of York took to marvelling. One onlooker wrote of "an effect indescribably beautiful and grand". Another, an enraptured lady, was moved to cry out: "What a subject for John Martin!"

By then the fire-raiser was well on his way northwards to his place of origin in the Tyne valley, where he was soon arrested. At his trial back in York the following month he laughed a lot and was found insane. "I have made as much noise as Bonaparte ever did, I think," he remarked to the court. In the lunatic asylum of Bedlam – where the Imperial War Museum now stands – he remained cheerful, drew imaginatively and gave no trouble. He died 10 years later.

Two elder brothers, William and Richard, attended his trial but, although he paid for the defending counsel, Henry Brougham (a future lord chancellor), John – seven years Jonathan's junior – stayed in London where he had a large family, an establishment to maintain and a reputation to lose. Hadn't Sir Thomas Lawrence once toasted him, tongue slightly in cheek, as "the most popular painter of the day"? As it was, the notorious Jonathan, the most celebrated arsonist of the age, was rivalled in fearless assertion and eccentricity by both Richard, a visionary-minded poet, and William, a prolific inventor and self-styled "philosophical conqueror of all nations" who used to wander the Newcastle quayside wearing a tortoise shell as a hard hat and selling ballads on topics such as the firing of York Minster. They were all pretty embarrassing. No wonder that, for well over a century, brother John was to be popularly known as "Mad Martin".

John Martin was a conviction artist, adept at extremes. Born in Haydon Bridge on the Tyne in 1789, he grew up in frontier landscape a couple of miles south of the Roman wall. His mother was pious, his father erratic and his elder brothers no doubt inspired in him notions of fervent self-expression. By 1806 he was in London, edging into artistry by executing picturesque views on china plates. He was perky, engaging, sociable, tireless, and his ambitions grew as he progressed through classical landscapes, scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses and suchlike, on to the lofty plateaux of history painting, winning attention at the Royal Academy and its rival body the British Institution with increasingly startling compositions. There was Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion (tiny figure scrambling on to a rock shelf) and The Bard (tiny figure on a high rock in Snowdonia cursing the occupying army of Edward I), followed by Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still (tiny figure persuading God to halt time for long enough to get the walls of Jericho to collapse). Grander compositions followed. The Fall of Babylon (1819) and its sequel, Belshazzar's Feast (1820), were scenes of panic in the vastnesses of what the artist assured his audience were authentic period settings. By this stage Martin had become aware of the advantages of making pictures phenomenal enough to rate entrance charges. The plagues of Egypt, the destruction of Herculaneum and Pompeii, the overthrow of Nineveh: all received the meltdown treatment. Unlike ordinary history paintings manned by statuesque protagonists, his big pictures played to a taste for disasters involving seething multitudes.

Martin enjoyed popular success for well over a decade. Discovering that the larger the picture the trickier it was to sell, he took to producing mezzotint versions, affordable for those lacking stately homes, producing them himself in his house in Allsop Terrace, near Regent's Park. Mezzotint proved the ideal medium for him: plates roughened to hold the ink, scraped to create light. Commissioned in the 1820s to do illustrations for Paradise Lost, he produced two sets, each plate a hymn to Milton, ranging between the silvery glades of paradise and the black infinities of Satan's underworld. Thence he surveyed the epochal past, summoning up in paint and print two of the most dramatic moments ever imagined: the breached river wall and death of Sardanapalus in The Fall of Nineveh, and the rocks tumbling amid lightning strikes and torrential swirls in The Deluge. These he worked on, coincidentally, over the months that Jonathan Martin spent dreaming up what he called his "job", the torching of York Minster, during which time he wrote an open letter in prime Tyne dialect: "I right Oh Clargmen to you to warn you to fly from the roth to cum you who are bringing a Grevus Cors upon the Land …"

At the height of his fame, John Martin was described by an acquaintance as well spoken and dapper, making him sound like an eager minor character in early Dickens: "light primrose-coloured vest with bright metal buttons, a blue coat set off with the same, his hair carefully curled and shining with macassar. He kept to his points with a tenacity not hastily subdued." Ardent for attention and respect, Martin moved freely in London society; he became friendly with Michael Faraday and Charles Babbage, the computer pioneer. And even after a period of setbacks – falling sales for the prints and the frustration of various projects – in 1840 he was reputable enough to attract Prince Albert to his studio, there to commission and discuss The Eve of the Deluge. This was to be the prince consort's preferred sort of painting: foreboding picked out in admirable detail, limpid atmosphere overall.

Martin's world, a world of crusty foregrounds, of cities constructed on clean lines and bright blue distances, was a world for ever under threat. His brother William, 17 years older, had been ahead of him for decades in exercising an appetite for reordering the planet. Self-taught and wonderfully self-confident, he developed a perpetual motion mechanism which was exhibited for upwards of 30 years in the Haymarket. Quite what it involved is uncertain, but in 1821 he produced an eloquent "Explanation" in which, he wrote, "it is as impossible for it to stand still as it is for a bird to fly without wings". Air pressure was the key. "Under God, the Great First Cause, AIR the Secondary Cause of all things, is the perpetual mover of this simple machine."

Neither brother saw any point in being shy about bright ideas. Their schemes and inventions coincided, overlapped and improved on one another. There were designs for safety lamps and a weighing machine, plans for colliery ventilation, for lighthouses and double-hulled ships. Eager to promote his notions, William versified them and issued pamphlets and proclamations extolling the Martin family's singular accomplishments. As for John, he became obsessed with the need for the redevelopment of London, transforming it from the "New Babylon", as it was often called, into a celestial city graced with parks and embankments along the Thames to contain sewers below the promenades and, later on, tunnels for a "connecting railway" not unlike the present Circle line, though obviously more efficient. A committee appointed in 1836 to inspect his Thames bank plans (which included Faraday, Charles Wheatstone, Charles Eastlake and JMW Turner) reported that "it has been given to Mr Martin to produce the simplest, as well as the most completely effectual, plan".

So much for "Mad Martin". His proposals, modified over many years and never abandoned, though none was realised in his lifetime, were generally more sensible than his brother's. He was ecologically prophetic. In his 1833 A Plan for Improving the Air and Water of the Metropolis he raised an issue such as had been dismissed by the scoffers who ignored divine warnings and were swept away in Noah's flood: "Is it not probable that a too ignorant waste of manure has caused the richest and most fertile countries such as Egypt, Assyria, the Holy Land, the South of Italy etc to become barren as they now are?"

Martin's vision of history – the cyclical occurrence of empire and civilisations, the loss of paradise, the unchanging pomposity of evil – fed not only his own art but, through his paintings and, even more, his prints, imagery of both Ancient and Modern. For while his pamphlets were relegated to archives, his massive reconstructions, his yawning perspectives and casts of thousands demonstrably influenced both railway architecture and movie epics (from DW Griffith to DeMille to King Kong). Indeed, in his attempts to recover from financial ruin brought on by the years spent on unrewarded efforts to improve things, he pioneered that genre embraced by many film producers: the remake. Bigger, with bluer distances and heftier impasto in the rockier places, his final works of the 1840s have the usual remake shortcomings. They look habitual. Not least the Last Judgement trilogy, more or less completed shortly before his death on the Isle of Man in 1854, in which the statutory damned and the saved, the good and the evil, paradise and urban chaos are posed in uttermost contrast.

Flashback to The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum from Martin's 1821 heyday, a magnificent blend of tsunami and eruption, tide receding, a shield raised in a futile effort to ward off molten hail. The painting was commissioned by the Duke of Buckingham, acquired by the National Gallery in 1869 and transferred from cellar to cellar to the Tate Gallery in 1918, consigned to museum oblivion.

On the night of 2 January 1928, the Thames river wall was breached at Millbank and the lower floor of the Tate was flooded. Among the paintings said to be "damaged beyond repair" was, naturally enough, The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Time passed and then, early this century, a decision was made that the remains of the painting were fit to be restored.

Earlier this year, in the course of several meetings with Tate Britain curators and conservators, I urged them not to reconstitute the one large missing fragment as they had determined to do. They assured me that their intentions would be responsibly gauged in terms of tone and detail. An "eye-tracking specialist" had been employed to map the eye movements of members of the public looking at the picture on screen; the public's eyes tended to linger at the torn edges, particularly around the missing summit of Vesuvius.

Waving my arms like one of Martin's prophetic linesmen, I argued repeatedly that such a painting needs not patching up but respect for what it is: a picture of an act of God (or the gods) that happens to have been dealt a titanic whack. It deserves special consideration. The missing area may be considered actual loss visited on a graphic representation of catastrophic loss. Here, after nearly two centuries, Thames embankments and Pompeiian waterfront align. History encircles us. We the onlookers, toeing the touchline between here and then, should surrender to being tantalised. It's a jigsaw lacking a few pieces, a filmic image enlivened with unforeseen jump cuts. The losses jolt the narrative.

Uneasiness about John Martin persists. He's all too readily relegated to being, if not "mad", then "not quite quite" and ("obviously") inferior to Turner. But this is to misjudge him. He was never one to skimp. His Destruction of Pompeii, like his Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah 30 years later, is good-value dioramic theatre. "Signs in the heavens, blood and fire, and vapour and smoke and so on," as Jonathan Martin testified. Pompeii done for: it's a thriller moment, not unlike the spectacle that onlookers witnessed the morning the choir of York Minster flared then smouldered.

John Martin stands for the surprise value of art. His reputation is on the turn again. As he said, in 1828: "Seen through the mist of ages, the great becomes gigantic, the wonderful swells into the sublime."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/sep/08/john-martin-painting-the-apocalypse?INTCMP=SRCH

John Martin: Apocalypse - at Tate Britain (21 September 2011 - 15 January 2012)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/johnmartin/default.shtm