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This suggests that before the success of Belshazar's Feast, Martin was best known for small landscape compositions in brown wash such as Travelers on a Road above a River. These wash drawings were primarily ideal landscape compositions, distant descendants of the monochrome landscapes of Alexander Cozens (cat. nos. 2-3). Musso had introduced the young Martin to landscape while they were both in Newcastle, although Musso had only engravings after artists like Claude and Salavator Rosa to teach from. Travelers on a Road above a River shows their lasting influence, conforming to the conventions of seventeenth-century Roman landscapes with its framing trees to the left and distant prospect of Italianate countryside. This delicate drawing, with its soothing evocation of an imaginary world, is quite different from the overwrought and luridly colored histories he aspired to paint and would eventually make his name with. In fact, Travelers on a Road above a River respresents the last gasp of this kind of work from Martin's brush. At the very same time he was making it he was also busy finishing Belshazars Feast, which would allow him to abandon these popular sepia drawing once and for all.

Matthew Hargraves

Hargraves, Matthew, and Scott Wilcox. Great British Watercolors: from the Paul Mellon collection. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2007, p. 152, no. 65