Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. A new book. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> During February and March 1849 the popular weekly newspaper the Illustrated London News featured a series of reports on the newly opened exhibition of contemporary art at the British Institution in Pall Mall in central London. Aimed at respectable middle-class family orientated readers around the country the Illustrated London News commented on and illustrated exhibitions and public displays in the context of its very broad coverage of domestic and international news culture sport and society gossip. Among the engravings illustrating pictures that year was a reproduction of a large painting of an epic biblical subject Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still upon Gibeon (fig.1) by a senior figure in British art John Martin (1789-1854) which featured prominently in the exhibition (and is now in the Charles Brooke Crawshaw Collection in Dewsbury Town Hall). Dwelling on this picture the reviewer ventured a biographical notice of the painter the inaccuracies of which prompted Martin to write to the editor John Timbs (1801-1875) offering his own autobiographical notes and hoping to set the record straight. Published in the next issue (17 March) this is the fullest statement about his life made by the artist giving an exceptional insight into the artist’s self-perception and public persona. It is this letter much-quoted in later accounts as the artist’s ‘autobiography which is reprinted here together with materials from the offending review. The review containing some errors of fact regarding Martin’s early life and its limited praise for the artist’s latest production is unsigned and it has been proposed that the author was the prolific writer Peter Cunningham (1816-1869). As he had married the painter’s second daughter Zenobia in 1842 and was therefore Martin’s son-in-law we would expect that he might have been better informed. Whoever the author the very fact that Martin was prompted to deliver this autobiographical missive as a response to a newspaper review which as Timbs claimed defensively in an editorial note (LL)