John Martin’s dramatic painting recounts scene in epic tale

The dramatic scene depicted in John Martin’s 1812 oil painting is a turning point in an anthology titled The Tales of the Genii: or, the Delightful Lessons of Horam, The Son of Asmar. English author James Ridley used the pseudonym Sir Charles Morell, a fictitious ambassador to India for the text. Ridley claimed that the book was a translation of text that had long been popular in India. In reality, he wrote and created the imagined backstory of the manuscript himself. 

Published in 1764, the story follows Sadak, a Persian nobleman and former soldier whose wife, Kalasrade, is abducted by their Sultan. The Sultan issues Sadak an challenge: Journey to the enchanted Waters of Oblivion and return with a sample in exchange for Kalasrade’s safe return. Sadak heeds the demand. After several consecutive trials throughout the story, he finds himself wearily clinging to the edge of a cliff. 

Martin emphasizes the harrowing aspects of this tale with strong contrasts of light and shadow and a pervasive red glow. Sadak, surrounded by a landscape of craggy mountaintops, pulls himself onto a precipice. His back is to the viewer, with his arms extended forward, grabbing onto a slab of rock. His right leg is bent and lifted as though it were stepping up; his left leg is extended into the open air. A waterfall flows over the rocks on either side of him, the foam and surf of which “washed him as he arose, and the noise of the impetuous currents overpowered him,” as Ridley writes of Sadak’s journey. Despite the obstacles, rays of light emanate from the upper left, suggesting that Sadak will ultimately achieve his goal.

However, Sadak’s positioning at the bottom of the painting implies the long journey that remains ahead of him—the expanse of rocky precipices that he must still surmount towers before him. Ridley writes in The Tales of the Genii: 

He reached a broad, flat, prominent rock whereon he laid his wearied body. . . . For a few minutes he lay entranced; and as he waked, forgetful of his situation, he rolled over the brink of the rock, and was falling downward, when he clasped the rock, and secured himself with his hands. . . . He ventured not to look down from the precipice he had escaped, but, turning his eyes upward, he perceived he had yet a third part of the rock to climb ere he could reach the top. 

This painting established the young John Martin’s reputation when it was exhibited in London in 1812. The first of Martin’s large, dramatic paintings, it defined the style for his oeuvre. The artist later illustrated an edition of English poet John Milton’s Paradise Lost, mezzotints of which can be viewed by appointment in SLAM’s Print Study Room. 

Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion is on view in Pauline Gehner Mesker Gallery 205.