Conrad Martens' father, J. C. H. Martens, was an Austrian-born merchant who originally came to London as
Austrian Consul. Conrad was born in 1801 at
Crutched Friars near
Tower Hill. After his father's death in 1816, he determined to pursue a career as an artist studying
landscape painting under the prominent
watercolourist
Copley Fielding. His two brothers, John William and
Henry, were also artists. In 1832 Captain Blackwood of
HMS Hyacinth asked him join his three-year cruise to India as a topographical artist. In
Montevideo near the end of 1833, he heard
Robert FitzRoy, captain of
HMS Beagle, who was employed in surveying the Straits of Magellan, wanted to engage an artist to replace the ship's artist
Augustus Earle, who had fallen ill. In this way he joined the
second voyage of Beagle and stayed on board for some two years, until the schooner which accompanied them was paid off and the officer who had command of her returned to
Beagle, meaning there was no longer room for Martens. While on board Martens struck up a lifelong friendship with
Charles Darwin, who was taking part in the expedition as a self-financing gentleman naturalist and companion to the captain. He went on to become one of the most proficient, prominent and prolific
landscape artist in the colony.
Beagle arrived in 1836, and Darwin and Captain Fitzroy commissioned a number of paintings from
Beagles voyages in
Tierra Del Fuego and the Pacific. Other large commissions followed, and in 1837 some of Martens' Australian
watercolours were exhibited at the
Royal Society in London. In 1839, however, a drought triggered an economic recession which was to last until the 1850s, and commissions became increasingly difficult to acquire. In the 1840s he turned to
lithographs, which allowed him to sell the same work many times over; his
View of Sydney from the North Shore was especially popular. Conrad Martens married Jane Carter, of Welsh heritage and the only child of William and Jane Carter at St James Church, Sydney, on 9 March 1837. Jane's father, a private barrister and First Master in Chancery of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, had purchased Martens' painting
View of Tahiti in September 1836. In late 1851 Martens sailed to
Brisbane, then travelling back by road across the Great Dividing Range to the Darling Downs, then south through New England to Sydney. En route, he lodged with squatters and pastoralists, drawing their houses and properties and hoping for commissions. The plan succeeded, and Martens was eventually commissioned to paint over seventy watercolours, nearly forty of which are still known today. Between 1841 and 1852 he travelled through the
Newcastle and
Hunter Valley regions; much of his collection was digitized at the
State Library of New South Wales. He exhibited at the Victorian Fine Arts Society in Melbourne in 1853 and at the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1855. Eventual improvement of the Australian economy in the later 1850s (largely due to the discovery of gold) led to an increase in significant commissions. A famous painting is
North Head, Sydney Harbour (1854). He sent Darwin a watercolour of Brisbane River and exhibited at the International Exhibition in London. In 1863 he became Assistant Librarian in the Parliamentary Library, securing his financial position, but severely curtailing the time he could spend on artistic work. from the New South Wales Academy of Arts (later
Art Gallery of New South Wales), of whose Council he became a member in 1877. From the later 1860s Martens suffered from
angina, and he died from a heart attack on 21 August 1878. Like many artists Martens was not universally acknowledged in his lifetime, but by 1910 his works were displayed in pride of place at the opening of the Mitchell Gallery at the
State Library of New South Wales. In particular it was watercolours that were at this time singled out for praise: "As works of art they rank high. As pictorial gems of our early story they are beyond price." ==Selected works==