Macbeth

John Martin's Macbeth of 1820 translates Shakespeare's tragedy into his characteristic idiom of brooding nocturnal landscape, showing Macbeth's encounter with the witches on a storm-swept heath. Martin's contribution to Shakespearean painting differs markedly from the theatrical tradition — he is uninterested in the actors' expressions and instead creates a landscape so overwhelmingly ominous that it seems to generate the play's evil from within the earth and sky. The painting reflects the Romantic interest in landscape as a moral force, where nature mirrors and amplifies the psychological states of its human participants.

Martin's characteristic dramatic scale dwarfs the human figures within a vast, craggy landscape under a lurid sky. The theatrical lighting effects and the extreme contrast between light and dark create a mood of supernatural dread appropriate to the Shakespearean subject.