e of Fine Arts_. A second son, Leopold Charles, writer, and
godson of Leopold, King of Belgium, was an authority on costumes and
numismatics (1817-89). His wife was a sister of Sir John Tenniel of
_Punch_.

John Martin was slightly cracked; at least he was so considered by his
contemporaries. He was easily affronted, yet he was a very generous
man. He bought Etty's picture, The Combat, in 1825 for two or three
hundred guineas. There are at the South Kensington Museum three
Martins, watercolours, and one oil; at Newcastle, an oil. At the time
of his decease his principal works were in the collections of Lord de
Tabley, Dukes of Buckingham and Sutherland, Messrs. Hope and
Scarisbruck, Earl Grey and Prince Albert. The Leyland family of
Nantchvyd, North Wales, owns the Joshua and several typical works of
Martin. Wilkie, in a letter to Sir George Beaumont, describes
Belshazzar's Feast as a "phenomenon." Bulwer declared that Martin was
"more original and self-dependent than Raphael or Michael Angelo." In
the Last Essays of Elia there is one by Charles Lamb entitled
Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Production of Modern Art.
The name of Martin is not mentioned, but several of his works are
unmistakably described. "His towered architecture [Lamb is writing of
Belshazzar's Feast] are of the highest order of the material sublime.
Whether they were dreams or transcripts of some elder
workmanship--Assyrian ruins old--restored by this mighty artist, they
satisfy our most stretched and craving conceptions of the glories of
the antique world. It is a pity that they were ever peopled."
"Literary" art critic as he was, Lamb put his finger on Martin's
weakest spot--his figure painting. The entire essay should be read,
for it contains a study of the Joshua in which this most delicious of
English prose writers speaks of the "wise falsifications" of the great
masters. Before his death the critics, tiring of him sooner than the
public, called Martin tricky, meretricious, mechanical. To be sure,
his drawing is faulty, his colour hot and smoky; nevertheless, he was
not a charlatan. As David Wilkie wrote: "Weak in all these points in
which he can be compared to other artists," he had the compensating
quality of an imposing, if at times operatic, imagination. Monkhouse
justly says that in Martin's illustrations to Milton the smallness of
scale and absence of colour enable us to appreciate the grandeur of
his conceptions with a minimu