John Martin (painter) - Legacy

Legacy

A number of Martin’s works survive in public collections: the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle - which also holds his famous ‘black cabinet’ of projects in progress; Tate Britain, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Louvre, the National Gallery of Art Washington DC, Yale Center for British Art, St.Louis Art Museum and elsewhere in the USA. The RIBA holds many of his engineering pamphlets. There are letters in private collections and at Queen Mary College in London. John Martin wrote two autobiographies, the first an article in The Athenaeum of June 14, 1834, page 459 and the most extensive in The Illustrated London News, March 17, 1849, pp. 176–177. 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. The first full biography was that by Mary L. Pendered whose chief source, Martin’s friend Sergeant Ralph Thomas, wrote a diary - now lost - of their friendship. Thomas Balston then wrote two biographies on the artist, the first in 1934, and the second (still the leading biography) in 1947. Christopher Johnstone produced an introductory book on Martin 1974, and in 1975 the art critic William Feaver was author of an extensively illustrated work on Martin's life and works. Since 1986, Michael J. Campbell has produced a number of publications on John Martin, including the leading publication on his work as an original printmaker, published by the Royal Academy of Arts, Madrid, in 2006.

John Martin’s influence survived. One of his followers was Thomas Cole, founder of American landscape painting. Others whose imaginations were fired by him included Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Brontës - who as children played with a model of him, the pre-Raphaelites - especially Rossetti, and several generations of movie-makers, from D. W. Griffith, who borrowed his Babylon from Martin, to Cecil B. DeMille and George Lucas. Writers like Rider Haggard, Jules Verne and H. G. 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. A number of Martin’s engineering plans for London which included a circular connecting railway, though they failed to be built in his lifetime, came to fruition many years later. This would have pleased him inordinately – he is known to have exclaimed to his son, Leopold, that he would rather have been an engineer than painter.