APOCALYPSE NOW!

“From my earliest experimentation with fantasy animation and special effects in the 1930s through to my Clash of the Titans in 1981, John Martin’s apocalyptic paintings have provided a model and inspiration. Barbara C. Morden’s excellent book brings to life the man and the techniques which shaped the creative imagination and visual perceptions of his own and succeeding generations.”
Ray Harryhausen, Hollywood film maker

John Martin was a multi-talented artist born into a time of critical change and turmoil, not unlike our own. His paintings and engravings captured the mood of apocalyptic expectation found in Britain and throughout Europe in the period from the French Revolution to the mid-19th century. From an extremely humble background, Martin’s success was achieved without academic support and patronage, being the result of his own drive and initiative. He was an entrepreneur, showman and celebrity with an awareness of a developing popular culture. This marks him out as essentially ‘modern’.

In his lifetime Martin, painter and engraver of the ‘apocalyptic sublime’ was, like Dickens, adept at capturing the emotions and appetite for sensation in the general population. In the later 19th century his reputation was high throughout Europe and, in America where his Judgement Pictures toured in the 1850s, the tropes and images of Martin contributed to the concept of the ‘American sublime’, influenced early cinema, and went on to shape digital media and film in the 21st century. Yet, in Britain, unlike his friend and rival painter Turner, for over a century the name and work of John Martin was forgotten or reduced to a footnote.

In the light of the revival of national and international interest in John Martin, Barbara Morden's John Martin: Apocalypse Now provides an informed accessible and highly readable guide to the context and meaning of Martin's pictures, and to their impact on viewers past and present.