From the sublime to the practical
What better way to fight the January blues than a culture hit in London on a bright, frosty spring day? My Sunday started with a trip to Hogarth’s House in Chiswick, PhD tourism really, which you can see and read about here. Then followed a surprisingly rewarding trip to Tate Britain, as I squeezed into the last day of John Martin: Apocalypse.
This was surprisingly rewarding because I had no idea of the breadth of Martin’s interests and talents. Most people are aware of his huge, sublime and apocalyptic biblical scenes (I referenced one, in fact, back in July, in a post about the RA Summer Show). These are indeed spectacular in the ‘flesh’ but I, for one, had no idea of Martin’s other passionate work to avoid contemporary, urban apocalypse by re-designing the London sewers, long before the famous and long-serving constructions by Bazalgette. Incidentally, I read a very compelling novel recently about the Victorian sewers, the Crimean War, self-harm and natural history, The Great Stink by Clare Clark. There is something of the claustrophobic horror which this novel conjures in Martin’s most apocalyptic paintings of the world consumed by fire and darkness. Yet works like The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum also show an intense level of detail in Martin’s attempt to represent the two ancient cities as accurately as possible.
It is interesting to see Martin’s seemingly easy jump from more Claudian pastoral scenes featuring small, allegorical figures in peaceful landscapes – painted at both the beginning and end of his career – to such figures overwhelmed by rugged, sublime nature in his huge works in oil. He represents a more ‘romantic’ vision, but also one fearful of human chaos and destruction at the dawn of the industrial age. Yet Martin’s highly accomplished engravings and mezzotints show an engagement and interest in these more mechanical, mass-produced forms of art, just as his sewer plans sought to bring art to the sanitary lives of the mass producers themselves. One particularly successful room recreates the kind of sound, light and effect shows that accompanied his large paintings on tour and, I’d imagine, brought both beauty and terror to industrialising lives.
These seemed to me like a type of cinema, and the paintings do evoke images of sci-fi films, video games, and blockbuster battle scenes dripping with life, colour and activity. Yet it was the juxtaposition of these epics with the quiet watercolours and careful sewer plans which struck me. From the sublime to the practical, Martin was meticulous about his detail and his popular effect, and was eminently a man of his age.