EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1. Brief Description of item Watercolour by (1789-1854) (b. Heydon Bridge, Northumberland, d. Douglas, Isle of Man), The Destruction of Pharaoh’s Host, signed and dated: ‘J. Martin/1836’ (lower right) Pencil and watercolour with gum arabic heightened with bodycolour and with scratching out; 23 x 33 ¾ in. (584 x 857 mm) (No condition report provided)

The watercolour illustrates the passage in Exodus, 14:26-31, when the Lord instructed Moses to stretch out his hand to release the waters and drown the Egyptians pursuing the fleeing Israelites across the Red Sea which had been miraculously parted to allow them passage: And the waters returned, and covered the chariots and the horsemen, and all the host of Pharaoh that came into the sea after them; and there remained not so much as one of them. But the children of Israel walked upon dry land in the midst of the sea; and the waters were a wall unto them on the right hand, and on their left. Moses stands on a promontory on the right of the image, commanding the waters, accompanied by the saved Israelites. Employing a panoramic composition to magnificent effect, Martin exaggerates the scale of the waves by sketching in the massed crowds of Israelites along the coast to the right and by diminishing the size of the drowning figures, horses and chariots, and two pyramids on the horizon. A blood red sunset below a sweeping black sky symbolizing mass death and retribution looms over the Red Sea.

2. Context Provenance and Prices (Probably) J.E. Jesse, by 1876; with Agnew’s, London; with Leger & Son, London, by September 1954, sold in or after 1958 to George Goyder; Sotheby’s, London, 11 July 1991, lot 192, where purchased by private owner (sold for world auction record price for watercolour by this artist £107,800); Christie’s, London, 3 July 2012, lot 139 (est. £300,000-500,000, sold for £758,050, also world auction record)

COMPARABLE PRICES • Girtin’s Jedburgh Abbey, sold for auction record for that artist in 1990 for £290,000 and again for record price of £470,000 in 2002 • John Robert Cozens Albano, ex Thomas Lawrence coll., record price £198,500 in 1991 and in 2010 estimated to fetch £500,000, sold for £2.4 million, record for any 18th-century British watercolour. (The Telegraph 2010) • Turner Heidelberg with a rainbow record £2,038,500 Sotheby’s 2001 (estimate £800,000) then record for Turner • Turner Blue Rigi, 2006, then world record price for any British work of art on paper. £5,800,000 (estimate was £2 million) paid £4,950,000

Literature M. L. Pendered, John Martin, Painter. His Life and Times, London, 1924, p. 146 T. Balston, John Martin 1789-1854. His Life and Works, London, 1947, p. 138n. ‘Perspex’‘Current shows and Comments’, Apollo, LX, no. 315, Sept.1954, pp. 55-6 repr. W. Feaver, The Art of John Martin, Oxf., 1975, pp. 91, 102, 177, 191, 224n.78, pl. 64 A. Wilton and A. Lyles, , London, Great Age of British Watercolours, exh. Cat. 1993, cat. 212 repr. Michael Campbell, John Martin, 1789-1854: la oscuridad visible: estampas y dibujos de la Colección Campbell [creation of light: prints and drawings from the Campbell Collection], Valencia: Bancaja; Madrid: Calcografia Nacional, Real Accademia de Bellas Artes; Bilbao: Museum de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2006, p. 567.

Exhibited Probably Wrexham, Art Treasures & Industrial Exhibition of North Wales, July- October 1876, no. 931, as ‘The Destruction of Pharaoh’s Host’, lent by J. E. Jesse [review in Wrexham Guardian and Denbighshire and Flintshire Advertiser, Sat. 12 Aug. 1876: “Mr Jesse contributes also two pictures by Martin…’The destruction of Pharoah’s Host in the Red Sea.’ It is of course a striking work… curling waves in the foreground”]; London, Royal Academy, and Washington, D.C., of Art, The Great Age of British Watercolours 1750-1880, January-July 1993, no. 212, illustrated in colour, pl. 303 3. Waverley criteria

• 2. Aesthetic: Outstanding aesthetic importance as an example of an ‘exhibition watercolour’ of a historical subject in the sublime landscape tradition • 3. Scholarship: Outstanding significance for the study of the history of British art and a pivotal work in the oeuvre of John Martin in particular.

Best known for his spectacular oil paintings and the series of mezzotints illustrating Paradise Lost and the Bible, here John Martin has created the epitome of an ‘exhibition watercolour’ in the sublime style, intended to stand its own ground in competition with oils on the walls of exhibitions. Throughout the 1830s, Martin had executed a number of enormous apocalyptic visions in oil that had been exhibited to great popular success around Britain and those, along with his mezzotints, ensured that his art ‘penetrated the culture of the nineteenth-century English-speaking world more deeply and more profoundly than that of any other modern artist’ (Martin Myrone, John Martin: Apocalypse, Tate, 2011, p. 11). His work was seen by thousands around the country in his own lifetime and by many more around the world through his prints. Edward Bulwer-Lytton thought he was ‘the greatest, most lofty, the most permanent, the most original genius of his age’. But his popular success (his prints hung on the wall of the Bronte parsonage and were an early influence on their imaginations and his influence on Cecil B. DeMille and the early Hollywood epics), Ruskin’s disapproval, Martin’s removal of his name from the lists for election to the RA and his focus later in his life on engineering sewers and delivering clean water to London also meant that until recently his status in the history of British art has been underplayed. The reputation of exhibition watercolours has also suffered, mainly seen as ‘Victorian’ and thus also popular and unworthy of serious attention until the 1980s. Martin’s importance to British art history is now recognized and this watercolour plays a key role in that history and a pivotal role in his own artistic development and career.

There were only a handful of British artists who employed the sublime successfully in oil on the grand scale: the artist Francis Danby, John Martin and J.M.W. Turner. Danby did not attempt watercolours of this type, only Martin and Turner did and this watercolour is an essential work for exploring Martin’s relationship with Danby’s compositions and their influence on his work in particular. This watercolour is the most spectacular of Martin’s works of this type and is an entirely different type of work compared to Turner’s more sublime watercolours like Travellers caught in a Snowstorm (BM) or his watercolours of shipwrecks. Turner’s are anchored in nature where Martin’s come entirely from his imagination and from the style and motifs he had developed in the 1820s in his oils and in the earlier 1830s in his mezzotints. Here he successfully captures them in watercolour, in an example that has no match in his own work or that of his contemporaries. The closest examples are of Manfred (Birmingham and Whitworth) and The Last Man (Laing) and a watercolour of a sunset over a rocky bay, much smaller and almost empty of figures and narrative (private collection). But none of them come close to the power of the colours, sweeping forms and bold horizontal format of this work. This was acknowledged by its inclusion in The Great Age of British Watercolours, the definitive watercolour exhibition of our age at the RA in 1993, where it stood out memorably from the rest of the works as an example unique in vision and in the medium and style used to achieve it. It would have been included in the monograph exhibition on Martin at Tate in 2011 if it had been available for loan and if seen there its unique relationship to the rest of his watercolours would have been evident and celebrated. Alone among them, it was not based on a larger oil nor was it turned into one later. Nor is it part of the series of watercolours or sepia drawings he produced in the 1830s to work out the themes and compositions of his series of mezzotints illustrating episodes of the Bible (two watercolours in the V&A fall into this category).

Instead this watercolour is developed from one of the key compositions from his mezzotint series, a composition that was described by the Library of Fine Arts (Jan. 1834) as ‘the finest of the series, the grandest and richest of all’. The mezzotint of The Destruction of Pharaoh’s Host (see image appended) was hugely well-known, admired and influential in its print form. Recognizing this, Martin developed it here in a daringly simple way through the medium of watercolour, exploring the technical abilities of the medium with extensive use of black pigment, bodycolour, and gum arabic and refining the composition in an almost modern way, reducing the detail of the figures and narrative and swirling central vortex found in the mezzotint and replacing it with a sweeping strong horizontal, near-abstract attention to bold compositional forms and a stylised treatment of the churning waves. He made watercolour records of the mezzotint compositions: there is a modest and restrained version in the V&A which underscores what a departure this large bold watercolour really makes in his work and what an achievement it was. It was the only time he was to develop a mezzotint composition in this way in watercolour, and is thus a pivotal work in his oeuvre, of critical importance in the development of his art. His testing of the limits of the medium in this work was recognized by Apollo in its selection of this work as the ‘Picture of the Month’ in September 1954 where it was referred to as ‘large and important...reminded one that the medium could be used imaginatively and even expressionistically.’ In fact, his experimentation with the medium sometimes resulted in confusing, almost ghostly figures like the one to the right here, which has been interpreted as Aaron but closer study might reveal to be an unsuccessfully scraped out or painted over figure, as sometimes found in other works, such as the Manfred in the Whitworth.

Martin explored and experimented and developed different media for his art throughout his career and it was from this point that watercolour was to become an important medium for his career – he became a Member of the New Society of Painters in Watercolours and exhibited as many as 11 works in 1837 at a time when his mezzotint projects were finished, his civil engineering plans had been frustrated and he was nearing bankruptcy. Watercolour represented a new venture, a return to painting, and a need from then onwards to produce works that conformed more to public taste or to popular literature, or were more closely based on landscape features actually found in nature, and he moved away from the bold and modern statements of the present work, which is thus Martin’s major standalone Biblical watercolour.

A note about former owners: It is not certain whether the work of this title exhibited at Wrexham in 1876 was this watercolour or a study for the engraving or another untraced work. More work needs to be done on the owner that time, J. F. Jesse, who exhibited two other works by Martin with it. The first certain owner was George Goyder, C.B.E., who was a Blake scholar and collector, working with Sir Geoffrey Keynes to establish the Blake Trust. He had an important collection of Bibles, and British paintings, watercolours and drawings by Cozens, Turner, Ruskin and others. Some were sold at Christie’s in 2003 and 2008 while others were accepted in lieu of tax for the Fitzwilliam.