The Bard

John Martin's The Bard of 1817 depicts the legend described in Thomas Gray's famous 1757 ode: the last Welsh bard, standing on a mountain precipice, cursing the invading army of Edward I before throwing himself into the abyss below. The subject combined the nationalist sentiment of Welsh cultural revival with the Romantic cult of the bardic hero who chooses death over subjugation. Martin positioned the figure at the edge of vertiginous cliffs above a valley filled with Edward's army, using contrasted light and dark to suggest the moral struggle between creative defiance and political power. The painting established several of Martin's recurring compositional strategies.

Martin's dramatic landscape dwarfs both the bard and the army below, using vertiginous cliff faces and an immense sky to create the sublime terror appropriate to the subject. The theatrical lighting and extreme scale are characteristic of his visionary approach to landscape.