MARTIN'S CRUCIFIXION.
SOME of our readers may be inclined to think that that we have dealt harshly with Mr. MARTIN'S productions, looking exclusively on his defects, and passing over what they deem his sublimities. We can assure them we have tried hard to be impressed with MARTIN'S crea- tions—casting aside his acknowledged defects, and taking into consi- deration only his powers ; and the most-we can give him credit for is the cleverness with which he repeats, in a variform but always exag- gerated shape, that one fine idea of his, of representing in a picture space, vastness, and numbers, to a supernatural extent. It is the tri- gonometry of painting. As intricately involved problems of per spective, we admire, but as works of imagination we are utterly un- moved by them. Mr. MARTIN assails us with the artillery of effect— rears up against our amazed sense piles on piles of nondescript archi- tecture—heaps up masses of rock—and inundates his artificial world with a " tide of human existence," to which JOHNSON'S at Charing Cross was but a rivulet; but all in vain. His lightnings play harm- lessly round our head ; no voice of power broods in his pitchy thunder- clouds ; and above all, no "still small voice" of human sympathy whis- pers to the heart. We should as soon think of being sentimental over one of Garsve's fairy palaces or giant's castles in the last pantomime. The Crucifixion is a subject which even when treated scenically, as Man riN has treated it--though it is the divine-human suffering and re- signation that the painter ought to depict, rather than the earthquake, and the darkened sun, and the troubled elements—should reflect on the mind the solcum horror of that awful event. The city shrouded in a pall of heaven's indignation, and the preternatural incident which marked the termination of Christ's sufferings, should be but accessories to the closing scene of his mission on earth. In Mr. MARTIN'S-picture it is the reverse : the crucifixion is a mere incident in the landscape ; and that is composed of a theatrical and unreal city, made up of endless. cutounadea raised one above another like flights of stags, castles tek
sembling stacks of dock warehouses, and the Temple itself repre- sented by a Greek structure with a square tower at one end. Neither the earthquake nor the opened graves giving up their dead are repre- sented; melodramatic horrors that we wonder have escaped the notice of a painter who revels in the preternatural. The clouds are black and white enough, however; and a long spear of electric fluid is darting athwart the darkened sun to rend the veil of the Temple. On the glacier-like rocks in the foreground, are crowds of people, and a thea- trical group of women, one of them fainting ; which we should have taken for the Mother of Jesus, with "the other Mary," but that a simi- lar group is seen under the cross. NORTIICOTE'S figure of Wat Tyler falling from his horse in the attitude of a man standing on his head, is introduced in one of the groups. If probability and coherence (by analogy) are necessary to a scene of imagination, how much more are they to the representation of a real event ? A city, like none that was ever inhabited by mortal men, in- troduced to mark the locality of an actual scene, is too glaring a viola- tion of truth to be tolerated even though the finest powers of art were employed to portray it. We look on this last effort of Mr. MARTIN'S fancy as a turgid attempt to reach the sublime, in which the artist's " vaulting ambition has o'er- leaped itself, and falls on t'other side."
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