John Martin was born on 19 July 1789 at Haydon Bridge, in Northumberland, in a one-room cottage. He was first apprenticed to a coachbuilder in Newcastle, where he learned heraldic painting. He then settled in London in 1806, where he earned a living painting on glass and china.
Fame came with Belshazzar’s Feast. Painted in 1820, it was shown at the British Institution, where it won a prize of £200. Even before exhibiting it, Martin had boasted that it would make more noise than any picture ever had. Five thousand people paid to see it. His great biblical compositions, with their immense architecture and crowds crushed by the elements, made him “the most popular painter of his day”, in the words of the portraitist Thomas Lawrence. Yet they were criticised by John Ruskin and other critics.
Martin engraved several of his paintings himself as mezzotints. These prints spread his work throughout Europe, and French Romanticism drew on it, in painting as in literature. The Brontë sisters even had a print of Belshazzar’s Feast hanging in their parlour at Haworth parsonage.
His last great works form a trilogy of huge canvases on the end of time: The Last Judgement, The Great Day of His Wrath and The Plains of Heaven. They are now held by Tate in London. John Martin died on 17 February 1854 in Douglas, on the Isle of Man.
