(no subject)

[winterbadger]

I think I've found the 19th century equivalent of Thomas Kinkade.

I got a promotion recently from a company that sells reproductions of famous paintings printed on paper designed to look like canvas. They sent me several freebies, which I think will make for fine day-to-day placements. :-) But one of them was so horrendously overblown and sentimental that I flipped it over to read about the artist.

Which was where I learned about John Martin.

Comments

[ticktockmary.livejournal.com]

Oh my god - those are AWFUL!

[winterbadger]

Aren't they? I can totally see them being hung in every early Victorian cleryman's front parlour, while people like Constable and Turner were being violently ill whenever they saw them.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

My God! He must have used up all the black and red paint in the local artist supply store.

[schizokitty.livejournal.com]

Mmm...I kinda like them. In context, of course, but then I always had a soft spot for overwrought Romantic visions (hey, I read Mary Radcliffe voluntarily). Oh, sure he's no Turner (he's not even a Rosetti), but let's be fair -- it's sinking a little low to call him a Kinkaide. Melodramatic, hysterical, and bombastic Martin may be, but he's not insipid. I think of them more as personal dream/nightmare images than artistically important paintings, and in that context I think he does a pretty good job. ^_^

[winterbadger]

Well, I was meaning that he was wildly successful with people who (like the Pope in the Monty Python skit) "may not know art, but I know what I like" while being universally loathed by all serious artists.