John Martin’s Paradise Lost, conceived between 1824 and 1827 as illustrations to Milton’s 17th-century epic poem, stands among the most influential graphic projects of British Romanticism. An endeavour befitting the grandeur of the text, Martin’s set of twenty-four mezzotints captures the wild sublimity of Milton’s poetry. Demonstrating astute foresight, the publisher Septimus Prowett chose Martin, a painter with limited printmaking experience as the illustrator, prioritising artistic sensibility over the practicalities of production. Indeed, the phantasmagorical wildernesses that came to characterise Martin’s printed oeuvre were already evident in his early paintings of Miltonic subjects, notably Adam’s First Sight of Eve (now at The Glasgow Museums).
Martin quickly developed a fluency in the mezzotint process. More than merely competent, he reached beyond the printmaking conventions of his contemporaries: dispensing with preparatory drawings, his subjects were executed directly onto the plates. This sense of invention paired with a reduced dependency on the etched line, allowed the artist to achieve a soft tonal range and celestial quality in pure mezzotint. The eternal opposition of light and dark that permeates through Paradise Lost is essential to Martin’s rendition. Isolated shafts of light delineate perspective and depth through vast, densely inked spaces. The author of The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), later observed of Milton’s cosmos: 'When we look up at the night sky, we are looking through darkness, but not at darkness.'