Conrad Martens (21 March 1801 – 21 August 1878)[1] was an English-born landscape painter active on HMS Beagle from 1833 to 1834. He arrived in Australia in 1835 and painted there until his death in 1878.
He went on to become one of the most proficient, prominent and prolific landscape artist in the colony. Beagle arrived in 1836, and Darwin and Captain Fitzroy commissioned a number of paintings from Beagle‘s voyages in Tierra Del Fuego and the Pacific. Other large commissions followed, and in 1837 some of Martens’ Australian watercolours were exhibited at the Royal Society in London. In 1839, however, a drought triggered an economic recession which was to last until the 1850s, and commissions became increasingly difficult to acquire. In the 1840s he turned to lithographs, which allowed him to sell the same work many times over – his View of Sydney from the North Shore was especially popular.[5]
In late 1851 Martens sailed to Brisbane then travelling back by road across the Great Dividing Range to the Darling Downs, then south through New England to Sydney. En route, he lodged with squatters and pastoralists, drawing their houses and properties, and hoping for commissions. The plan succeeded, and Martens was eventually commissioned to paint over seventy watercolours, nearly forty of which are still known today.[7] Between 1841 and 1852 he travelled through the Newcastle and Hunter Valley regions with much of his collection digitized at the State Library of New South Wales.[8]
In 1862 he received a letter from Darwin, and replied congratulating him on the success of On the Origin of Species.[9] He sent Darwin a watercolour of Brisbane River and exhibited at the International Exhibition in London. In 1863 he became Assistant Librarian in the Parliamentary Library, securing his financial position, but severely curtailing the time he could spend on artistic work.[3] Nevertheless, he exhibited at the Paris International Exhibition in 1867 and found time to tutor aspiring Australian talent such as Mary Gedye. He received his first public commission in 1872, from the Victorian Gallery (later National Gallery of Victoria), for a watercolour of Apsley Falls on Waterloo (Pastoral) Station, near Walcha, New South Wales, and a second similar commission in 1875[10] from the New South Wales Academy of Arts (later Art Gallery of New South Wales), of whose Council he became a member in 1877.
He exhibited at the Victorian Fine Arts Society in Melbourne in 1853, and at the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1855. Eventual improvement in the Australian economy in the later 1850s (largely due to the discovery of gold) led to an increase in significant commissions. A famous painting is North Head, Sydney Harbour (1854).[2]
xx, 150 p., [9] p. of plates : ill. ; 29 cm. #0321 Martens