“John Martin: Apocalypse” at Tate Britain. To say that the art of John Martin divided nineteenth-century critical opinion would be something of an understatement. The eminent Victorian, Edward Bulwer Lytton – the man who coined the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword” – declared Martin to be “the greatest, the most lofty, the most original genius of the age”. But Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought he was “a poor creature” who “looked at Nature through bits of stained glass, and was never satisfied with any appearance that was not prodigious”; and John Ruskin proclaimed that “Martin’s works are merely a common manufacture, as much makeable to order as a tea-tray or a coal scuttle.”
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