British 1789-1854 John Martin Gallery His first exhibited subject picture, Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion (now in the St. Louis Art Museum), was hung in the Ante-room of the Royal Academy in 1812, and sold for fifty guineas. It was followed by the Expulsion (1813), Paradise (1813), Clytie (1814), and Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still upon Gibeon (1816). In 1821 appeared his Belshazzar's Feast, which excited much favorable and hostile comment, and was awarded a prize of £200 at the British Institution, where the Joshua had previously carried off a premium of £100. Then came the Destruction of Herculaneum (1822), the Creation (1824), the Eve of the Deluge (1841), and a series of other Biblical and imaginative subjects. The Plains of Heaven is thought to reflect his memories of the Allendale of his youth. Martin's large paintings were inspired by "contemporary dioramas or panoramas, popular entertainments in which large painted cloths were displayed, and animated by the skilful use of artificial light. Martin has often been claimed as a forerunner of the epic cinema, and there is no doubt that the pioneer director D. W. Griffith was aware of his work." In turn, the diorama makers borrowed Martin's work, to the point of plagiarism. A 2000-square-foot version of Belshazzar's Feast was mounted at a facility called the British Diorama in 1833; Martin tried, but failed, to shut down the display with a court order. Another diorama of the same picture was staged in New York City in 1835. These dioramas were tremendous successes with their audiences, but wounded Martin's reputation in the serious art world.  Related Paintings of John Martin :. | The Stables Viewed from the Chateau at Versailles | Manfred and the Witch of the Alps (mk47) | The Assuaging of the Waters | The Eve of the Deluge (mk25) | Belshazzar's Feast |
Related Artists:
Gustave Brion
1824-1877 French French painter and illustrator. His family settled in Strasbourg in 1831 and placed him in the studio of the portrait and history painter Gabriel-Christophe Gurin (1790-1846) in 1840. He then earned his living mainly by teaching drawing and copying paintings. In 1847 he successfully submitted his first work to the Salon: Farmhouse Interior at Dambach (untraced). In the summer of 1850 he moved to Paris, where he took a studio in a house shared by Realist artists. Brion exhibited regularly at the Salon: in 1852 The Towpath (untraced) was bought by the de Goncourt brothers; and in 1853 he showed the Potato Harvest during the Flooding of the Rhine in 1852 (Nantes, Mus. B.-A.), in which the influence of Gustave Courbet and Jean-Francois Millet (ii) can be seen in the Alsatian peasant figures.
Jozef Israels
1824-1911 Dutch Jozef Israels Gallery Israels has often been compared to Jean-François Millet. As artists, even more than as painters in the strict sense of the word, they both, in fact, saw in the life of the poor and humble a motive for expressing with peculiar intensity their wide human sympathy; but Millet was the poet of placid rural life, while in almost all Israels' pictures there is some piercing note of woe. Edmond Duranty said of them that they were painted with gloom and suffering. He began with historical and dramatic subjects in the romantic style of the day. By chance, after an illness, he went to recruit his strength at the fishing-town of Zandvoort near Haarlem, and there he was struck by the daily tragedy of life. Thenceforth he was possessed by a new vein of artistic expression, sincerely realistic, full of emotion and pity. Among his more important subsequent works are The Zandvoort Fisherman (in the Amsterdam gallery), The Silent House (which gained a gold medal at the Brussels Salon, 1858) and Village Poor (a prize at Manchester). In 1862 he achieved great success in London with his Shipwrecked, purchased by Mr Young, and The Cradle, two pictures that the Athenaeum magazine described as the most touching pictures of the exhibition.
Andreas Achenbach
(September 29, 1815 - April 1, 1910) was a German landscape painter. Born at Kassel, he began his art education in 1827 in Desseldorf under Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow at the Desseldorf Academy of Painting. He studied at St Petersburg and travelled in Italy, Holland and Scandinavia.In his early work he followed the pseudo-idealism of the German romantic school, but on removing to Munich in 1835, the stronger influence of Louis Gurlitt turned his talent into new channels, and he became the founder of the German realistic school. Although his landscapes evince too much of his aim at picture-making and lack personal temperament, he is a master of technique, and is historically important as a reformer. The Chambers Biographical Dictionary says of him that "he was regarded as the father of 19th century German landscape painting." A number of his finest works are to be found at the Berlin National Gallery, the New Pinakothek in Munich, and the galleries at Dresden, Darmstadt, Cologne, Desseldorf, Leipzig and Hamburg. He died in Desseldorf. His brother, Oswald Achenbach (1827-1905), was also a painter.