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The Deluge

Printmaker: Martin, John, HRSA · 1789-1854

The Deluge

"John Martin’s magnificent large scale mezzotints are the most impressive original works ever to have been produced in the soft steel medium and are…

"John Martin’s magnificent large scale mezzotints are the most impressive original works ever to have been produced in the soft steel medium and are amongst the most powerful and spectacular works of the period. These extraordinary visionary designs represent some of the very few truly creative, original works to be produced by any major artist of the period using the mezzotint process.

John Martin considered The Deluge to be one of the most important of all of his works and he came to regard his painting of this subject as his favourite work. The biblical Deluge was a subject of recurring interest to him throughout his life, representing the meeting point of his religious and scientific beliefs. Even as late as 1840, over a decade after this engraving, he created two enormous paintings as companion subjects to complete a trilogy centered around The Deluge. Indeed, this subject was to provide the basis for five further related engravings, the last of which, The Eve of the Deluge, was to be his final published mezzotint plate.

This mezzotint engraving of The Deluge, published in 1828, was an enormous popular and financial success for John Martin. However, remarkably few impressions of this tremendous large-scale print have survived intact and impressions of this quality are now rare.

John Martin was concerned that this image of The Deluge should not be seen as pure fantasy. He took pains to detail the various aspects of the composition in an eight-page pamphlet which he published to accompany and explain this engraving. In the sky are represented the sun, the moon and a comet, the conjunction of which John Martin believed had caused the Deluge due to their combined gravitational pull. The ark was placed carefully, high on an outcrop of the mountains, “that it should not have to bear the shocks, heavings of the earth and out breakings of the waters – or it would be wrecked at the outset”. The scale of the entire work was calculated with the greatest accuracy, the mid-ground perpendicular rock supposedly 4,000 feet in height. " (http://www.campbell-fine-art.com/items.php?id=1068, sourced 2018-10-01, from description of an earlier state impression sold by Campbell Fine Art)

A Proof before letters. Campbell (John Martin, Visionary Printmaker, p.97) notes that early impressions (as here) do not have the lion-like animal that sits outside the cave at foreground right. He also refers to a small, almost vertical finger of rock just projecting from the waves at lower left, at the extreme left of the mid-ground rock formations, which is present only in the very earliest of impressions.