In the land of Canaan, where God had sent him after the death of Moses, Joshua discovers the extent of the promised land on the mountainside. The last rays of the sun shone down on the cliffs, setting the horizon ablaze and forcing the few onlookers to pause and contemplate.

John Martin recreates the island world he has discovered on his travels through the prism of the fantasy world he has built up throughout his life. As a Romantic artist, he sought to bring out the sublime, to reveal the most powerful - even devastating - aspects of nature, and to confront man with his pettiness in the eyes of the divine. The Old Testament subject of the discovery of a new world is merely a pretext for depicting an expanse that is vast in the extreme, dizzying in its relief and marked by the rough edges of the immemorial times that have succeeded one another.

An artist of modest origins, Martin arrived in London in 1806 and began exhibiting at London's Royal Academy in 1811. From his earliest years, the young artist drew inspiration from the Bible and literature. Following in the footsteps of Füssli (1741-1825), Martin explored worlds of fantasy, wonder, dreams and nightmares. He neither rejects nor circumvents academic rules, but reinterprets the tradition of historical landscape in his own way. The few figures placed here and there justify the themes of his compositions and at the same time allow him to let sublimated nature flourish.

Exploiting the speed imposed by the watercolour technique, Martin gave emphasis to the ruggedness of the rocks amidst which nestled a lake of tranquil waters. The late day in the land of Canaan, with its strong contrasts of light and shadow, is adorned with an orange-tinged sky from which a saturated red sun bursts forth, warming the muted blue that surrounds it.

Martin will no doubt have come across this landscape during his stays on the Isle of Man between 1848 and 1853, when, paralysed, he settled there and died shortly afterwards. A variation of the composition on the same theme exists and is now in the collections of the Isle of Man Museum (Fig. 1; inv. 1954-3583).

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