Historical Drama

Eruption of Vesuvius by the English painter John Martin (1789-1854). Martin specialized in dramatic natural disasters and presented his paintings as a kind of pre-cinema.

Welsh Alps

Beyond any doubt this is a very romantic painting. A Gaelic bard is fleeing from an English castle in Wales and curses his pursuers from above a cliff. This nice story is based on the legend that king Edward I ordered to kill all bards to suppress Gaelic culture.

But anyway the artist John Martin (1789-1854) was famous as a landscape painter. And it’s nice to see that he puts some mountains from the Swiss Alps into Wales. The whole scenery is a theatrically arranged invention.

The Bard (c. 1817)