John Martin was born in 1789 near Hexham, Northumberland. He received lessons in drawing and painting from Italian artist, Boniface Musso. The 17th-century artist, Claude, inspired his early works. An interest in printmaking led him to learn etching. His first published print, Classic City in 1816, became his artistic hallmark. During 1823 he devoted more time printmaking while studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art. Martin's works were popular among the conventionalist but critics were vicious in their judgment of his hyperbolic vision of the sublime. Martin's spectacular visionary designs created a new style, dubbed "Martinesque." He was also nicknamed "Mad Martin" because of the shocking novelty of his conceptions and confusion with his brother who was institutionalized.
His work influenced Thomas Cole, Washington Allston and Frederick Church. One of the reasons for Martin's success was that he created eclectic pictures that conjured a number of contemporary concerns including political aspirations, new technological inventions, archeological discoveries of the period, evolutionary ideas (he constructed some of the first dinosaurs to be described) and romantic expression in literature.
"No painter has ever, like Martin, represented the immensity of space - none like him made architecture so sublime, merely through its vastness: no painter, like him, has spread forth the boundless valley, or piled mountain upon mountain to sky - like him has none made light pour down in dazzling floods from Heaven; and none has like him painted 'darkness visible' of the infernal deeps." - Eidenburg Review, 1829.
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