John Martin, Heaven and Hell, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne
Peter Lewis applauds an exhibition that is helping visitors rediscover the dramatic works of Northumberland-born artist John Martin
Northumbria has rediscovered the 19th-century artist John Martin. It has taken some time.
The last exhibition, John Martin: Artist-Reformer-Engineer, was in 1970, long after the 1951 Festival of Britain display of Martin’s work in Tyneside’s Contribution to Art. More than 80 works have been assembled at the Laing Art Gallery’s show, Heaven and Hell.
Martin’s work will then visit the Millennium Gallery in Sheffield in late June and from September until January 2012 they will be at Tate Britain.
Julie Milne of the Laing is insistent that Martin is seriously undervalued: “He had a unique vision… he was one of the very strong exponents of the sublime, along with people like Turner, and he deserves his place beside those painters.” Martin was born near Haydon Bridge in 1789. “By birth, my station could scarcely have been humbler,” he wrote.
His mother taught the surviving five of her 13 children to follow a strict Calvinistic protestantism. John’s elder brother, Jonathan, who later sought to exemplify that faith by burning down York Minster, recalled that their mother insisted: “There was a God to serve... and that all liars and swearers are burnt in Hell with the devil.”
John’s father, Fenwick, sought a liberal education for John at the nearby grammar school. Aged 14, the boy was apprenticed to a decorator of coaches in Newcastle. At 17 he left for London where, after some months of penury, he became a painter on glass and china.
He received no academic training in formal painting and was derided by the art establishment. The Royal Academy of Arts in London reluctantly exhibited a few pictures but his application for membership was rejected.
His paintings are usually categorised as within the genre of the apocalyptic sublime; sublime in its classical meaning of an effect that is unexpected, inspiring or horrifying.
At the time Martin was painting, all of Europe was apprehensive of wars, revolutions and civil unrest; hardships, famines and bad harvests abounded. Little wonder then that in literature and art the images of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were galloping fast.
The end is nigh
Martin, ever the showman, exploited this sense of terror. He filled his huge canvases with extravagant landscapes in which the earth convulses, the waters boil, the sun and the moon stand still and the buildings of a puny mankind fall into a fiery pit.
The most famous of these pictures: The Great Day of His Wrath; Belshazzar’s Feast; The Last Judgement; The Last Man, Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still, dominate the walls of the Laing in great swathes of molten reds and coruscating oranges.
At one time we might have viewed them with amused detachment, examples of 19th-century religious obsessions. But now it is unsettling to see their closeness to the images on our television screens of events in Australia, New Zealand, Japan and the Middle East.
My first visit to the Laing to see the Martin exhibition coincided with a school party of seven-year-olds, one of who explained to me that the picture we both were studying was “a ginormous earthquake and tsunami”.
A elderly couple nearby informed me earnestly that the exhibition was part of a divine warning that the world would end this summer. My second visit to the exhibition was to hear two lectures arranged for the University of the Third Age.
Our expert gave us a detailed resumé of the life of Martin, then an assessment of his status as a painter. Armed with a great deal of advice, we went back into the galleries to test whether Martin could stand comparison with Turner and his contemporaries. Martin was a phenomenon; by today’s definition, a celebrity.
He was not, however, the ignorant Geordie of legend but a highly cultivated self-made man who built up a circle of patrons and friends, including Prince Albert, Charles Dickens, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Turner, among many others.
Had he not been an artist he could have been an engineer of distinction.
The exhibition suggests that his preoccupation with cataclysmic doom inspired his passion for urban improvement. Among his displayed projects are detailed plans for a Thames Embankment, a circular London railway line and a modern sewage system for the capital – all projects picked up and completed by others.
Cinematic inheritors
In the 1820s he became aware of a mass market for his work through reproductions. Martin taught himself the techniques of engraving on steel rather conventional copperplate. The mezzotints he produced became a creative medium in its own right.
The series of illustrations he created for Milton’s Paradise Lost are truly sublime in their fine detail, imagination and artistry. And they were influential.
Mezzotints of The Fall of Babylon and The Deluge hung on the walls of Haworth for the edification of the Brontë children, who incorporated them in their own storytelling. From withering depths to Wuthering Heights in one generation.
But what of the huge paintings that are supposedly the stars of Heaven and Hell? The images of Hell have an impact but Heaven seems very wishy-washy, with floaty feathery angels. Martin’s figure drawing is dreadful, as exemplified in the inept painting he made for Queen Victoria’s coronation, where the texture of the paint looks like linoleum.
Martin is always stolidly theatrical, almost cinematic, in his treatment of scale and architecture. He addresses the eye rather than challenges the mind. The argument that his true inheritors were film-makers such as DW Griffith and Cecil B DeMille is a convincing one.
This is a fine exhibition; informative, provocative and long overdue. Anyone interested in British art should catch the show in Sheffield or Tate Britain… unless, of course, the Apocalypse strikes first.
Peter Lewis is a writer and a past director of Beamish, the North of England Open Air Museum
The last exhibition, John Martin: Artist-Reformer-Engineer, was in 1970, long after the 1951 Festival of Britain display of Martin’s work in Tyneside’s Contribution to Art. More than 80 works have been assembled at the Laing Art Gallery’s show, Heaven and Hell.
Martin’s work will then visit the Millennium Gallery in Sheffield in late June and from September until January 2012 they will be at Tate Britain.
Julie Milne of the Laing is insistent that Martin is seriously undervalued: “He had a unique vision… he was one of the very strong exponents of the sublime, along with people like Turner, and he deserves his place beside those painters.” Martin was born near Haydon Bridge in 1789. “By birth, my station could scarcely have been humbler,” he wrote.
His mother taught the surviving five of her 13 children to follow a strict Calvinistic protestantism. John’s elder brother, Jonathan, who later sought to exemplify that faith by burning down York Minster, recalled that their mother insisted: “There was a God to serve... and that all liars and swearers are burnt in Hell with the devil.”
John’s father, Fenwick, sought a liberal education for John at the nearby grammar school. Aged 14, the boy was apprenticed to a decorator of coaches in Newcastle. At 17 he left for London where, after some months of penury, he became a painter on glass and china.
He received no academic training in formal painting and was derided by the art establishment. The Royal Academy of Arts in London reluctantly exhibited a few pictures but his application for membership was rejected.
His paintings are usually categorised as within the genre of the apocalyptic sublime; sublime in its classical meaning of an effect that is unexpected, inspiring or horrifying.
At the time Martin was painting, all of Europe was apprehensive of wars, revolutions and civil unrest; hardships, famines and bad harvests abounded. Little wonder then that in literature and art the images of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were galloping fast.
The end is nigh
Martin, ever the showman, exploited this sense of terror. He filled his huge canvases with extravagant landscapes in which the earth convulses, the waters boil, the sun and the moon stand still and the buildings of a puny mankind fall into a fiery pit.
The most famous of these pictures: The Great Day of His Wrath; Belshazzar’s Feast; The Last Judgement; The Last Man, Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still, dominate the walls of the Laing in great swathes of molten reds and coruscating oranges.
At one time we might have viewed them with amused detachment, examples of 19th-century religious obsessions. But now it is unsettling to see their closeness to the images on our television screens of events in Australia, New Zealand, Japan and the Middle East.
My first visit to the Laing to see the Martin exhibition coincided with a school party of seven-year-olds, one of who explained to me that the picture we both were studying was “a ginormous earthquake and tsunami”.
A elderly couple nearby informed me earnestly that the exhibition was part of a divine warning that the world would end this summer. My second visit to the exhibition was to hear two lectures arranged for the University of the Third Age.
Our expert gave us a detailed resumé of the life of Martin, then an assessment of his status as a painter. Armed with a great deal of advice, we went back into the galleries to test whether Martin could stand comparison with Turner and his contemporaries. Martin was a phenomenon; by today’s definition, a celebrity.
He was not, however, the ignorant Geordie of legend but a highly cultivated self-made man who built up a circle of patrons and friends, including Prince Albert, Charles Dickens, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Turner, among many others.
Had he not been an artist he could have been an engineer of distinction.
The exhibition suggests that his preoccupation with cataclysmic doom inspired his passion for urban improvement. Among his displayed projects are detailed plans for a Thames Embankment, a circular London railway line and a modern sewage system for the capital – all projects picked up and completed by others.
Cinematic inheritors
In the 1820s he became aware of a mass market for his work through reproductions. Martin taught himself the techniques of engraving on steel rather conventional copperplate. The mezzotints he produced became a creative medium in its own right.
The series of illustrations he created for Milton’s Paradise Lost are truly sublime in their fine detail, imagination and artistry. And they were influential.
Mezzotints of The Fall of Babylon and The Deluge hung on the walls of Haworth for the edification of the Brontë children, who incorporated them in their own storytelling. From withering depths to Wuthering Heights in one generation.
But what of the huge paintings that are supposedly the stars of Heaven and Hell? The images of Hell have an impact but Heaven seems very wishy-washy, with floaty feathery angels. Martin’s figure drawing is dreadful, as exemplified in the inept painting he made for Queen Victoria’s coronation, where the texture of the paint looks like linoleum.
Martin is always stolidly theatrical, almost cinematic, in his treatment of scale and architecture. He addresses the eye rather than challenges the mind. The argument that his true inheritors were film-makers such as DW Griffith and Cecil B DeMille is a convincing one.
This is a fine exhibition; informative, provocative and long overdue. Anyone interested in British art should catch the show in Sheffield or Tate Britain… unless, of course, the Apocalypse strikes first.
Peter Lewis is a writer and a past director of Beamish, the North of England Open Air Museum
Project data
- Cost £155,000
- Main funders Heritage Lottery Fund £55,900; MLA Renaissance £14,620; Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums £15,480 (Great British Art Debate) Fenwick Limited £20,000; Friends of the Laing £20,000; Newcastle City Council £11,500; Sir James Knott Trust £10,000; John Martin Circle £7,500 (non-Great British Art Debate budget)
- Curators Julie Milne, Sarah Richardson (Laing Art Gallery), Martin Myrone, Anna Austen (Tate Britain)
- Design Haley Sharpe and in-house
- Exhibition ends 5 June