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 :. | Pandemonium - One out of a set of mezzotints with the same title | View of the Orangerie | The Last Man | The Great Day of His Wrath | The Seventh Plague |
Related Artists:
Jean Barbault
French Painter, 1718-1762, French painter and engraver. A pupil in Paris of Jean Restout II, in 1745 he failed to win the Prix de Rome and at his own expense went to Rome early in 1747. The following year, by which time he was a member of the circle of Paolo Anesi, Philothee-Francois Duflos, Jean-Laurent Legeay and Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Barbault made engravings for the Varie vedute di Roma antica e moderna published in Rome. As a painter he was encouraged by Jean-Francois de Troy, director of the Academie de France, who commissioned from him 20 small pictures representing characters from the Turkish masquerade organized by the pensionnaires for the carnival of 1748, of which 11 survive (Beauvais, Mus. Dept. Oise; Narbonne, Mus. A. & Hist.; Paris, Louvre (see fig.); Venice, Col. Cini; and elsewhere). When, by special favour, he became a pensionnaire at the Acad?mie (1749-53), he made a copy (Lille, Mus. B.-A., destr. 1916) for Louis XIV of Luca Penni's fresco the Baptism of Constantine in the Vatican Stanze (it was then attributed to Raphael). While travelling in Rome, Abel-Fran?ois Poisson de Vandieres, Marquis de Marigny, commissioned a series of Italian Costumes, of which some of the originals or replicas remain (Castres, Mus. Goya; Dijon, Mus. B.-A.; Orleans, Mus. B.-A.; Paris, Louvre). In 1751 Barbault depicted the planned procession of the pensionnaires for the carnival in a frieze-like painting (380*3920 mm), the Masquerade of the Four Corners of the World (Besaneon, Mus. B.-A. & Arch?ol.). Many of Barbault's idealized Roman landscapes date from this period (examples Angers, Mus. B.-A.; Baltimore, MD, Walters A.G.; Madrid, Mus. Cerralbo; Notre Dame, IN, Snite Mus. A.; and elsewhere), but above all he wanted to be a painter in the grand manner, painting St Francois de Sales Placing Jeanne de Chantal under the Protection of St Vincent de Paul (Rome, SS Giovanni e Paolo) for the beatification of Ste Jeanne de Chantal in 1751.
Willem Kalf
1619-1693 Dutch Willem Kalf Galleries Willem Kalf was born in Rotterdam, in 1619. He was previously thought to have been born in 1622, but H. E. van Gelder??s important archival research has established the painter??s correct place and date of birth. Kalf was born into a prosperous patrician family in Rotterdam, where his father, a cloth merchant, held municipal posts as well. In the late 1630s, Willem Kalf travelled to Paris and spent time in the circle of the Flemish artists in Saint-Germain-des-Pr??s, Paris. In Paris he painted mainly small-scale rustic interiors and still-lifes. Kalf??s rustic interiors are typically dominated by groups of vegetables, buckets, pots and pans, which he arranged as a still-life in the foreground (e.g. Kitchen Still-life, Dresden, Gemäldegal; Alte Meister). Figures usually appeared only in the blurred obscurity of the background. Though painted in Paris, those pictures belong to a pictorial tradition practised primarily in Flanders in the early 17th century, by such artists as David Teniers the Younger. The only indication of the French origin of the paintings are a few objects that Flemish exponents of the same genre would not have pictured in their works. Kalf??s rustic interiors had a large influence on French art in the circle of the Le Nain brothers. The semi-monochrome still-lifes which Kalf created in Paris form a link to the banketjes or 'little banquet pieces' painted by such Dutch artists as Pieter Claesz, Willem Claeszoon Heda and others in the 1630s. During the 1640s, Kalf further developed the banketje into a novel form of sumptuous and ornate still-life (known as pronkstilleven), depicting rich groupings of gold and silver vessels. Like other still-lifes of this period, these paintings were usually expressing vanitas allegories.
Adrian Ludwig Richter
German, 1803-1884 German painter, printmaker and illustrator. He ranks with Moritz von Schwind as the most important representative of late Romantic painting and printmaking in Germany. In contrast to the work of such leading masters of early Romanticism as Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich, which was ambitious in content and innovative in form, Richter's art was more modest in its aims, in line with the restrained intellectual climate of the Biedermeier period.