Geoscience Reference
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sold in their hundreds. He put immense pressure on himself
to succeed, and as a young artist sent the narrative painting
Sadak
in Search of the Waters of Oblivion
to the 1812 Royal Academy ex-
hibition. 'To my inexpressible delight', he wrote afterwards,
the work was written about in the newspapers, and sold. The
subject derived from a then popular story, 'Sadak and Kalasrade',
written in 1764 in the 'Persian' style by the English author James
Ridley. The diminutive figure of the warrior Sadak climbs
through a fiery underground river inside a volcano on a trial to
win his love:
John Martin,
Destruction of Pompeii
and Herculaneum
,
c.
1821, oil on canvas.
He marched onward, the hot soil scorching his feet, and the
sulphureous stenches blasting his lungs, till he perceived a
huge cave, through which ran a rivulet of black water.³8
Already the painting has what were to become the full 'Martin-
ian' ingredients: the heated colour, the desperate circumstances,
over-powering and terrifying natural forces. The trick Martin had
successfully performed was to put fashionable rural landscape
