The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum

John Martin (19 July 1789 – 17 February 1854) was an English Romantic painter, engraver and illustrator. He is celebrated for his melodramatic scenes of cataclysmic events crowded with tiny figures placed in vast architectural or landscape settings. Few artists, have been subject to such extremes of critical fortune where he was courted by royalty, yet savaged by critics. Martin's first major triumph was Belshazzar's Feast painted in 1820, of which he boasted beforehand, "it shall make more noise than any picture ever did before... only don't tell anyone I said so.” Martin was also a skilled engineer and from 1828 turned away from painting, and became involved with many plans and inventions, which not completed in his lifetime his ideas influenced future development. He developed a fascination with solving London's water and sewage problems, involving the creation of the Thames embankment, containing a central drainage system, while he also developed plans for an circular underground railway similar to the modern day Circle Line. See more details on the artist on his Wikipedia page John Martin.