The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (297 page)

(1875–1947).
French painter and drunghtsman. He was one of the
Fauves
, and for a time his boldness of colour almost matched that of
Matisse
(his lifelong friend). However, he soon abandoned Fauvism and turned to a comparatively naturatistic style. He painted some fine portraits and did a number of powerful female nudes between 1910 and 1914, but he was primarily a landscapist. His favourite—eventually almost exclusive—themes were ports and the bridges and quays of Paris, subjects he depicted with unaffected simplicity and great sensitivity to tone. Marquet was an outstanding draughtsman and from 1925 worked mainly in watercolour. He travelled widely and built up an international reputation, but he lived very quietly (he was timid in personality) and refused all honours.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1898–1954).
American painter. He was a newspaper illustrator in the 1920s, but became well known for his pictures depicting the shabbiness and tawdriness of city life in New York (
Tattoo and Haircut
, Art Institute of Chicago, 1932). He was also capable of bitter satire against the smug complacency of the wealthy, but in general his work shows a love of depicting teeming life through ugly but colourful subjects rather than a desire for social protest. His aim was to depict contemporary life in the manner of the Old Masters and he worked mainly in
tempera
, also experimenting with other venerable techniques. He came from a wealthy family and to some extent his work expressed a rejection of the affluent and genteel circumstances in which he grew up.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1767–1835).
English sporting painter, an able follower of
Stubbs
. He was a pupil of the portrait painter L. F.
Abbot
, but from
c.
1792 he turned to animal painting. In 1812 he settled in Newmarket, where he concentrated on pictures of horses and hunting and racing scenes.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1789–1854).
English
Romantic
painter and
mezzotint
engraver, celebrated for his melodramatic scenes of cataclysmic events crowded with tiny figures placed in vast architectural settings. He caught the public imagination with spectacular paintings such as
Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still
(United Grand Lodge of Great Britain, London, 1816), the work that made him famous, and in 1821
Lawrence
referred to him as ‘the most popular painter of the day’. His work was indeed truly popular, for he made his living mainly through the sale of engravings of his pictures rather than the paintings themselves. He became famous in France as well as Britain, he was knighted by Leopold I of Belgium (1833), and his influence was felt by American artists such as
Cole
. However, while he pleased a vast audience and was regarded by some admirers as one of the greatest geniuses who ever lived, Martin was reviled by
Ruskin
and other critics, who considered his work vulgar sensationalism. Few artists, indeed, have been subject to such extremes of critical fortune, and his fame sank to such an astonishing degree after his death that very large and once famous paintings by him were sold in the 1930s for as little as £2. In the 1970s his reputation greatly revived. Martin made mezzotints not only as a means of reproducing his paintings but also as original compositions. Particularly noteworthy are his illustrations to the Bible and John Milton's
Paradise Lost
, which show that although he had great weaknesses as an artist, especially in his drawing of the human figure, he also had a vividness and grandiloquence of imagination not unworthy of such elevated subjects. He is sometimes called ‘Mad Martin’, but the sobriquet is undeserved and applies more to his brother Jonathan, who was insane and set fire to York Minister. John Martin was eminently sane and in the 1830s almost bankrupted himself with extremely ambitious but entirely practical plans for improving the water supply and sewage system of London. They were unsuccessful, but reveal a heroic desire to put the architectural visions of his paintings into a concrete form. His work is best represented in the Tate Gallery, London, and the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1905–84).
British painter and sculptor. In 1930 he married Mary Balmford , whose artistic development as Mary
Martin
had very close affinities with his own. In the 1930s he painted in a naturalistic style and was in close touch with artists of the
Euston Road School
, but during the 1940s the representational character of his work receded until in 1948–9 both he and Mary Martin made their first completely abstract paintings. With Victor
Pasmore
the Martins were among the leaders of a new
Constructivist
movement which burgeoned both in England and in America in the 1950s, making their first constructions at the beginning of the decade. Thereafter he was a pioneer in England of a number of different forms of geometrical abstraction.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search