MARTIN’S “DELUGE.”
Sir E. Bulwer Lytton has written this eloquent criticism: “Martin’s ‘Deluge’ is the most simple of his works; it is, perhaps, also, the most awful. Poussin had represented before him the waste of inundation; but not the inundation of a world. With an imagination that pierces from effects to their ghastly and sublime agency, Martin gives, in the same picture, a possible solution to the phenomenon he records; and in the gloomy and perturbed heaven, you see the conjunction of the sun, the moon, and a comet. I consider this the most magnificent alliance of philosophy and art of which the history of painting can boast.”