Brown wash and graphite on medium, slightly textured, cream wove paper
Dimensions:
Sheet: 7 3/4 x 10 5/8 inches (19.7 x 27 cm)
Credit Line:
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Copyright Status:
Public Domain
Accession Number:
B1975.4.1339
Gallery Label:
John Martin is best known today for his vast canvases of epic historical and biblical subjects, but his earliest landscapes were small sepia drawings of ideal scenery. Martin’s first exposure to landscape art was looking at engravings after Claude and Salvator Rosa in the collection of his teacher, the Italian artist Bonifacio Musso. This imaginary view of travelers on a road shows the influence of these engravings on the young Martin, conforming to the conventions of seventeenth-century Roman landscapes with framing trees to the left and a distant prospect of Italianate countryside. Gallery label for Great British Watercolors from the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art (Yale Center for British Art, 2008-06-09 - 2008-08-17)