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not a similar Volcano in Ireland?' - My only notion of an
Irish Volcano consisted of the Lake of Killarney which I
naturally conceived her to mean - but on second thoughts
I divined that she alluded to Iceland & to Hecla - and so it
proved - though she sustained her volcanic topography for
some time with all the amiable pertinacity of 'the Feminie'.³5
John Martin (1789-1854), a diicult and driven artist who
had travelled from Newcastle upon Tyne in 1806 to make his
fortune in London, had by the early 1820s become the talk of the
town. ³6 In 1822 he showed a group of paintings at the fashion-
able Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, including the Destruction of
Pompeii and Herculaneum , which caused a sensation on its first
exhibition. The young architect Ambrose Poynter told his friend
Robert Finch, then resident in Rome, all about it:
[Martin] has just finished another large picture - the destruc-
tion of Herculaneum and Pompeii of which the sky is loaded
with chrome and vermillion, and the foreground, where he has
attempted the same sort of effect as in Belshazzar, a complete
manqué - But the content of landscape, comprising a bird's eye
view over all the cities at the base of Vesuvius - Herculaneum
- Oplentis - Pompeii - Stabia etc is wonderful - Admirably
composed - with great attention to truth, and detailed in a
most extraordinary manner.³7
Martin made a good living and a controversial name for
himself out of paintings and prints of cataclysmic death and
destruction. However, through a quirky fault-line in his person-
ality he came to squander it all in the 1830s and '40s by spending
ten years of his life, and all of his fortune, on attempting and
failing to establish a civil engineering infrastructure to enable
London to have a freely running and permanent clean water
supply. This was personal civic duty taken to the ultimate degree,
and in undertaking it Martin became a figure of fun. In the days
of his ascendancy, however, he was more popular than Turner: his
paintings sold for many hundreds of pounds, and his engravings
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