JM and his circle v.24/11/2018
The Prometheans:
John Martin and his circle
by Max Adams
3,000 words, with illustrations
Synopsis
In 1806 the apocalyptic painter and amateur engineer John Martin arrived in London from his home in rural Northumberland. London was at that time perhaps the busiest, most interesting place in the world for young thinkers and artists - but it was expecting an invasion from Napoleon at any time. Rivalled as a public artist in his day only by JMW Turner, Martinmaintained an extraordinary circle of friends that included Charles Dickens, theaged William Godwin, Michael Faraday, the Brunels, the Hunts and a group of emerging women intellectuals such as Caroline Norton. Max Adams looks at the social milieu in London between the death of George III and the accession of Victoria, and finds a rich seam of social, artistic and intellectual cross-fertilisation.
Max Adams
Max Adams is a writer, broadcaster and historian. His biography of Lord Collingwood was published in 2005 by Weidenfeld & Nicholson in London and by John Wiley in New York. He has published widely in academic journals and magazines. He is 44, and lives in Newcastle upon Tyne. He is currently writing Playing with Fire: John Martin and the promethean generation. His research is supported by an Elizabeth Longford Award.
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They were the generation whose childhoods were lived at the pace of the horse and the sailing ship, who spent much of their early lives in the shadow of war and revolution. Their parents were clergymen, blacksmiths, farmers. The society of their youth celebrated amateurism and pastoralism and tolerated corruption, madness and dissent. The new world which they created moved at the apparently limitless pace of the steam engine. It was the world of emerging professions: engineering, commercial art, journalism, manufacturing. What began with parliamentary enclosure ended with the Great Exhibition and the Communist manifesto. The means by which such change took place are complex, perhaps impossible to disentangle from each other. But what surprises us most about the period between America's revolution and the triumph of Victorian modernism is the openness, the sheer intellectual exuberance of a new, mobile, self-confident and ambitious society.
John Martin came from an impoverished rural background in the Tyne valley of Northumberland. His father Fenwick, a feckless but attractive man of great strength and 'dauntless resolution' was by turns a drover, pedlar, tanner, publican and swordsman. He was also a romantic. In about 1771 he eloped with a local girl called Emma Thompson and carried her off to Gretna Green on horseback, for a marriage at the smithy's anvil.
John, born in the eighteenth year of their marriage, was the youngest of twelve children, of whom five survived childhood. The oldest brother, William, became an eccentric inventor whose miners' lamp was said to be better than that of Humphry Davy, but whose obsession withperpetual motion and with denouncing Isaac Newton as a false wicked prophet wrecked any hope of professional advancement. The second son, Richard, spent his life in the army: he was with Wellington in the Peninsular War and got through Waterloo unscathed. The third son, Jonathan, whose life tells a tortured tale of misfortune and schizophrenia, was the 'Mad' Martin who in 1829 set fire to York Minster and who spent the rest of his life in Bedlam. All three wrote poetry - some of it very bad doggerel - and drew. All three became financial and social burdens on their illustrious brother.
John Martin, born inthe week that the Bastille was stormed in July 1789, was both luckier and more canny than his brothers. Two hundred years ago in 1806, the year that William Pitt'sdeath led to the 'Ministry of all the Talents' and Bonaparte proclaimed his Continental system for strangling British trade, John came south to London to make his fortune as an artist. He had been apprenticed to a Newcastlecoach painter, had broken his indentures after being refused a wage rise, had been supported by his father, and had won his case. Fenwick then paid for him to be tutored by the exiled Lombardy artist Boniface Musso. When the Mussos moved south on the back of an illusory promise of work John followed, to his parents' dismay. For many years he struggled as a glass painter and hawker of sketches, before deciding to try his hand at landscape painting. Heavily influenced by reading Milton, by the prevailing promethean zeitgeist, and by his mother's apocalyptic evangelism - 'there is a God to serve and a hell to shun, and all liars and swearers are burnt in hell with the devil and his angels,' she is supposed to have told her children - he more or less single-handed invented a genre of painting that was both sublime and cinematic.
His subjects included The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, The Fall of Babylon and his masterwork of 1821, Belshazzar's Feast. They were characterised by their stupendous architectural scale, by the furnace-like realism of their fiery depths, and by the puny human figures which so offended the Joshua Reynolds school of historical painting. But John was no religious fanatic like Jonathan. He was a rationalist and a Deist: 'Why should man use one logic for religion and a different kind for general affairs?', he once asked a friend.
John chose the subjects of his paintings for their public effect. He sold few, and made most of his money by exhibiting - people who paid their shilling to see paintings like The Fall of Nineveh were known to faint when they first saw them - and by developing a new steel mezzotint technique. Its most successful application was in a series of engravings which he made to illustrate a new edition of Paradise Lost. Although he was criticised by many (John Ruskin in particular) for his lack of classical technique, no-one doubted his extraordinary gift for portraying the awesome scale of biblical events. No wonder that a hundred years later Cecil B. de Mille would translate his paintings into set designs. It was as if, in the age of the diorama and illuminated glass paintings, Martin had invented cinemascope a century early. Charles Lamb wrote,
His towered structures are of the highest order of the material sublime. Whether they were dreams, or transcriptions of some older workmanship – Assyrian ruins restored by this mighty artist – they satisfy our most stretched and craving conceptions of the glories of the antique world.
Martin was an overtly commercial artist; but he was also a Radical, and his subjects were intended to convey, to a discerning audience, the folly of grandeur, the inevitability of punishment following hubris. Thus Martin, who was notorious for hissing during the playing of the National Anthem, intended Belshazzar's Feast to parody the grotesque excesses of George IV's coronation. Not only that but, as Ralph Waldo Emerson noted on a visit to London in the 1840s, Martin had an acute sense of historical and political irony. Was not the overcrowded, dismal, cholera-plagued London of that decade very like Babylon before its fall?
The smoke of London, through which the sun rarely penetrates, gives a dusky magnificence to these immense piles of building in the west part of the city, which makes my walking rather dreamlike. Martin's pictures of Babylon &c are faithful copies of the west part of London, light, darkness, architecture and all.
After John's marriage to Susan Garrett the Martins set up home on Allsop Terrace in Marylebone, a Whig-ish and fashionable part of town that still gave access to open countryside to the north. Susan was a literate, intelligent woman who shared John's love of both classical literature and chess: they were highly accomplished players. It was their love of chess, along with their reformist politics, that earned them an acquaintance with John Hunt and his wife. Hunt was the proprietor of the Radical Examiner. He and his brother Leigh, the paper's editor, had been imprisoned in 1813 for some very rich remarks about the Prince of Wales. They continued to produce the paper during their confinement, and although after about 1820 it became more of a literary organ than before - their support of Keats, Shelley and Coleridge attracted the label 'Cockney poets' - the Examiner remained an intellectual thorn in the side of the establishment for many years.
At the end of that decade, just before his elevation to the Lord Chancellorship under Earl Grey, Henry Brougham the celebrated lawyer, reformer and scientist defended Jonathan Martin as he had done the Hunts; but more successfully. Jonathan might otherwise very well have hanged, for the McNaughton rules on criminal insanity would not be framed until the 1840s. In the event, he was sent to Bedlam for the rest of his life.
What began as an informal weekly chess match between the Martins and the Hunts developed into a regular gathering of Radical intellectuals, journalists, poets and others of their acquaintance. Some of these acquaintances were apparently mutually exclusive, as John's son Leopold later recalled after a morning's walk with Edwin Landseer...
We found the painter much dejected, quite out of spirits and sorts. Suspecting that he was suffering from a night of exciting play (for, like Sir Thomas Lawrence, he was given to this sad infatuation), my father induced him to go for a walk...
As they strolled gently in the park, Martin raised his hat in salute to a passing lady, which quite shocked Landseer:
Why, her husband, Mr. Albany Fonblanque, is a radical! How fortunate that you were not seen by more than a true friend, one not likely to expose you.
Perhaps part of Martin's undoubted charm - he was small, Byronesque, considered to be very beautiful and passionate in argument - was that his circle was not self-referential: he did not surround himself with artists or sycophants. Indeed, his career was spent outside the artistic establishment. He had argued with the RoyalAcademy after the first of his pictures to be hung there was ruined by a carelessly spilt pot of varnish; when he was eventually nominated for membership, he received not a single vote.
One of his closest friends was Leopold, the Saxe-Coburg prince who would have been Queen Charlotte's consort had she lived, and his neice Queen Victoria's regent had she acceded to the throne before she did. Later, Prince Albert would call by while out on his early morning horse-ride, and Martin would answer the door in his dressing gown. Other visitors included the great French palaeontologist Baron Cuvier, who on hearing that Martin was to paint The Deluge decided to check for himself that Martin's geological theories were up to scratch. Leopold Martin recalled that his father was out at the time, but that the Baron was admitted to his studio and sat staring silently at the painting for an age..
At length he rose with the exclamation, 'Mon Dieu!', at the same time taking a small bouquet from his button-hole, placing it on his card, and depositing both on my father's palette. He took his departure without another word.
Above all, Martin liked the company of scientists and engineers. In 1841 we find him with Isambard Kingdom Brunel standing on the footplate of one of the engineer's Great Western broad-gauge locomotives, attempting to set a new speed record. Alongside them (it must have been a bit crowded) was Professor Charles Wheatstone, another close friend of Martin's. Wheatstone was 'short-sighted, and with wonderfully rapid utterance, yet seemingly quite unable to keep pace with an overflowing mind.' He was the inventor of the concertina and the electric telegraph, and during his acquaintance with Martin he experimented with measuring the speed of light. Martin became close friends with pioneer of electricity Michael Faraday, a supporter of his visionary plans for building a water supply and sewage system for the capital. These plans were never adopted during his lifetime, but nearly all of them came to pass in thenext generation under men like Bazalgette and Paxton, after cholera and the Great Stink had concentrated legislative minds. Martin also became acquainted with George Stephenson and Humphrey Davy, though not quite so amicably. Both of these icons of the industrial revolution had been cited by William Martin, in one of his innumerable vituperative tracts,for having stolen various of his ideas. Davy's lamp, which in truth killed more miners than it saved, William libellously referred to as the 'murder' lamp.
By 1832, the year of the Great Reform Act, the Martin 'evenings' were famous, and their circle encompassed almost everyone who was anyone. John had been introduced by Robert Peel to Sam Rogers, the banker, poet and art collector and through Rogers' 'breakfasts' to a milieu that included the Duke of Wellington and other political luminaries. These gatherings had a purpose beyond mere gossip and the oiling of the wheels of patronage: the cross-fertilisation of intellect, wealth, and visionary purpose brought energy to the industrial revolution and, perhaps unintentionally, to the reform movement.
Through George Cruikshank the caricaturist, who hosted equally famous gatherings, the Martins came to know Dickens and Charles Babbage. Babbage, the genius who designed the analytical and difference engines which were the forerunners of the digital computer, was too distracted to build either of them, and too impatient a communicator to make himself widely understood. Of the few able to grasp his ideas, the most celebrated was Ada Lovelace, Byron's daughter - herself a mistress of calculus. Illustrative of Babbage's mind, and of the freedom of intellectual discourse that the times allowed, is the oft-quoted letter which he is supposed to have written to Lord Tennyson upon the poet's publication of The vision of sin, which contained the lines Every minute dies a man/Every minute one is born..
I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum-total of the world's population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum-total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows: 'Every moment dies a man/and one and a sixteenth is born.' I may add that the exact figures are 1.167, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.
Susan Martin, according to her son Leopold, was anything but a wallflower. In particular, she nurtured a group of women writers who, though less well known than say, Jane Austen or Mary Shelley, carried considerable influence in their day. One of these was the youngish orphan Jane Webb, who in 1826 and very much in tribute to Frankenstein published the forerunner of many a horror story and founder of an entire film genre: The Mummy! She later married one of its admirers, JC Loudon, and with him established one of the most successful gardening partnerships in Victorian England. Another of Susan's protegés was Caroline Norton.
Norton was a granddaughter of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, a strikingly good-looking and very bright, determined woman. She had had the misfortune to marry a brutal tyrant, George Norton, who abused her, took her children from her and then cited Lord Melbourne as her co-respondent in an adultery trial. Her reaction, against the background of the Reform Act of 1832, was to use her personal influence with the great men of state - Melbourne included - to draft and see through parliament the first women's rights legislation. She became an articulate, stubborn and persuasive writer on the right of women to retain their own income, and to have access to their own children. Her tragedy was to lose a child to illness (she was not informed until the child was on his deathbed); to be bound to Norton for many years because he refused to divorce her, and to die shortly after her eventual marriage to a long-time friend.
One imagines that evenings at the Martins' were rarely dull. Several of them were recorded by Leopold, often allowed to stay up late along with his young friend John Tenniel - who was taught to draw by John Martin and who would, in the fullness of time, perhaps remember the more eccentric parties when he came to draw the Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts. Entertainment was often provided by well-known singers and musicians such as Tom Moore,John Braham and Captain James Burns, son of the Scottish Bard. Robert Burns had been an early friend of William Martin, who claimed never to have seen him sober. After singing, the guests might talk about the new Thames Tunnel being sunk by the Brunels, or Mr Faraday's electrical experiments, or a visit paid to JMW Turner's chaotic house in Cavendish Square, where John and Leopold had found him painting The Fighting Temeraire. Turner struck Leopold physically as the most unlikely genius. He wore ' a loose body coat, very open side pockets, with a dirty paint-rag stuck in one of them; loose trousers, unbraced, and hanging under the heels of his slippers... and a rather old hat on his head.'