• Name: Martin, John
• Gender: Male
• Birth Date: 19  July  1789
• Death Date: 17  February  1854
• Occupation: artist

The first entry in the later period of contacts involves a reference to Ninevah: 'The Fall of Nineveh' (1828; mezzotint 1829) was John Martin's largest and grandest Old Testament spectacular with embankments breached along the Tigris and the emperor Sardanapalus preparing a funeral pyre of Babel proportions. Martin showed the painting in the Brussels Salon in 1833. It remained unsold'. According to St Clair, in 1830 when Godwin was 74 he ‘took tea with the painter John Martin and struck up a remarkable friendship. Martin invited him to dinner nearly every week and was to introduce him to most of the artists of the day including Turner, Wilkie, and Landseer’ (p. 478). Ralph Thomas writes a journal entry in 1832 (which corresponds to a 9 January 1832 entry in Godwin's diary: Last night I took tea with Stebbing, after which we went to Martin’s. There we found Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, Mrs Burns and captain Burns, the youngest son of the poet, Allan Cunningham and wife, Godwin, Pringle – and about a score more….

Thomas goes on to describe the evening, full of singing of Burns songs, encores, and toasts (in Mary L. Pendered, John Martin, Painter: His Life and Times) It’s agreed in the three biographies of Godwin that Martin and Godwin met around 1830 (over a game of whist) and no other Martin is mentioned. However, Godwin did attend Martin’s exhibition in 1825 when ‘The Creation’ was shown at the second annual exhibition of the society of British Artists at Suffolk-street, Pall-mall East in a suite of rooms. (Morning Chronicle, 26 March 1825).

The earlier Martin/Martins entries are associated first with Mary (Perdita) Robinson and subsequently with the Lambs, with nothing to suggest they are different people. The Martins seem to include at least Martin, Mrs Martin and Miss Martin (possibly identical with) L. Martin. Lamb wrote a poem to Louisa Martin and in a letter to Wordsworth, many years later he asked a favour for this lady:--"The oldest and best friends I have left are in trouble. A branch of them (and they of the best stock of God's creatures, I believe) is establishing a school at Carlisle; Her name is Louisa Martin ... her qualities ... are the most amiable, most upright. For thirty years she has been tried by me, and on her behaviour I would stake my soul. She is as good a human creature, - next to my Sister, perhaps the most exemplary female I ever knew." (22 February 1834) (Lucas, p. 815). Lamb's biographer, E. V. Lucas, confessed to being able to find nothing of the Martin Family (p. 322)

There is no suggestion of a link between these Martins and John Martin the painter, of whom Lamb was later extremely critical in his ‘Essay on the barrenness of the imaginative faculty in the production of modern art’ in Elia where the work was ‘described as a huddle of vulgar consternation’. an anecdote. Martin also illustrated MWS's Last Man starting with a sketch in 1826 on the theme (the year of publication), which is now lost, a watercolour, and a large, later painting which is now at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool (MD Romantic Circles).

• Morning Chronicle, 26 March 1825
• DNB
• www.rc.umd.edu.
• St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys
• Mary Lucy Pendered, John Martin, painter: His Life and Times (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1923)
• E. V. Lucas, The Life of Charles LambLondon, Methuen, 1905

This table lists the people this person is most frequently noted with in the diary.