The son of a German merchant, Conrad Martens (1801-1878) was born in London. After his father died in 1816, Conrad decided that, rather than pursue a mercantile career, he would follow the example of his two bothers and become a painter. He trained as a watercolour artist, studying landscape painting with Copley Fielding, one of the foremost art teachers in London. In the early 1820s he and his mother went to live near Exeter in Devon and for the next ten years he undertook sketching tours in Devon and the neighbouring counties. In 1833 he exhibited with the Royal Society of British Artists in London. In May 1833 Martens joined HMS Hyacinth on a voyage to the East Indies. Two months later, at Rio de Janeiro, he left the ship and journeyed to Montevideo, where he replaced the ailing Augustus Earle as the artist on the surveying vessel HMS Beagle, captained by Robert FitzRoy. He became a good friend of Charles Darwin, the naturalist on the ship. He left the Beagle at Valparaiso in 1834 and sailed to Tahiti and New Zealand. He reached Sydney in April 1835. He had not intended to remain in Australia, but he was to live there for the rest of his life.
Within a short time Martens was making sketching trips to the Blue Mountains, the Illawarra and Broken Bay. He opened a studio in Sydney and quickly built up a clientele of wealthy landowners and merchants, whose homes and estates he painted. During the depression of the 1840s he led a precarious existence, but he did very little commercial work. To augment his income, he produced lithograph views, such as Sketches in the Environs of Sydney (1850) and Sketches illustrative of the scenery of New South Wales (1851). In 1851 he made an extensive sketching tour through the Darling Downs and he visited Brisbane several times. In 1862 he was appointed the deputy parliamentary librarian. His reputation grew in his later years and he undertook commissions for both the National Gallery of Victoria and the National Gallery of New South Wales.
For nearly forty years Martens was the leading landscape artist in New South Wales and the quality of his work was remarkably consistent. His early paintings of Sydney were in the tradition of picturesque topography, but like Turner he later tried to capture the romantic grandeur of his settings. In his numerous paintings of Sydney Harbour he was concerned with the effects of light, clouds and storms. He painted properties on the western plains and northern tablelands, but he was more attracted to the dramatic gorges and rock cliffs of the Blue Mountains and the bays and shores of Sydney Harbour.
Sources:
- Sydney Cove; Conrad Martens (1801-1878); Courtesy: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
- Martens Collection; Courtesy: National Library of Australia
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