It’s Art Friday! I remember first seeing this painting by John Martin (1789-1854) on a school Art trip to the Tate Gallery in 1976. The most famous exhibit at the time was Carl Andre’s Equivalent VII (the ‘pile of bricks’). My best friend O and I were not impressed by the latter and hatched a plot to relocate one of the bricks to the gallery cafe but were, perhaps fortunately, spotted by a security guard before we had touched one.
Although his paintings fell out of favour, he influenced many others from the Pre-Raphaelites to film producers, including DW Griffith, the French Romantics and even his friend Brunel, who based some of his railway bridge designs on Martin's work.
Painted between 1851 and 1853 this vast (2.4 x 3.5 metres) painting was more to my taste, to the extent that I bought a large and expensive poster of it in the shop there. No reproduction really does it justice and you really have to see the actual painting to get the full effect (it had only been left to the Tate in 1974).
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