In 1833 The Fall of Nineveh went to Brussels, where it was bought by the Government.  Martin was elected member of the Belgian Academy and the Order of Leopold was conferred on him.  His old quarrels with the Academy broke out in 1836, and he testified before a committee as to favouritism.  Then followed The Death of Moses, The Deluge, The Eve of the Deluge, The Assuaging of the Waters, Pandemonium.  He painted landscapes and water-colours, scenes on the Thames, Brent, Wandle, Wey, Stillingbourne, and the hills and eminences about London.  About this time he began scheming for a method of supplying London with water and one that would improve the docks and sewers.  He engraved many of his own works, Belshazzar, Joshua, Nineveh, Fall of Babylon.  The first two named, with The Deluge, were presented by the French Academy to Louis Philippe, for which courtesy a medal was struck off in Martin’s honour.  The Ascent of Elijah, Christ Tempted in the Wilderness, and Martin’s illustrations (with Westall’s) to Milton’s Paradise Lost were all completed at this period.  For the latter Martin received L2,000.  He removed to Lindsey House, Chelsea, in 1848 or 1849, and was living there in 1852, when he sent to the Academy his last contribution, Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.  November 12, 1853, while engaged upon his last large canvases, The Last Judgment, The Great Day of Wrath, and The Plains of Heaven, he was paralysed on his right side.  He was removed to the Isle of Man, and obstinately refusing proper nourishment, died at Douglas February 17, 1854.  After his death three pictures, scenes from the Apocalypse, were exhibited at the Hall of Commerce.  His portrait by Wangemann appeared in the Magazine of Fine Arts.  A second son, Leopold Charles, writer, and godson of Leopold, King of Belgium, was an authority on costumes and numismatics (1817-89).  His wife was a sister of Sir John Tenniel of Punch.

John Martin was slightly cracked; at least he was so considered by his contemporaries.  He was easily affronted, yet he was a very generous man.  He bought Etty’s picture, The Combat, in 1825 for two or three hundred guineas.  There are at the South Kensington Museum three Martins, watercolours, and one oil; at Newcastle, an oil.  At the time of his decease his principal works were in the collections of Lord de Tabley, Dukes of Buckingham and Sutherland, Messrs. Hope and Scarisbruck, Earl Grey and Prince Albert.  The Leyland family of Nantchvyd, North Wales, owns the Joshua and several typical works of Martin.  Wilkie, in a letter to Sir George Beaumont, describes Belshazzar’s Feast as a “phenomenon.”  Bulwer declared that Martin was “more original and self-dependent than Raphael or Michael Angelo.”  In the Last Essays of Elia there is one by Charles Lamb entitled Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Production of Modern Art.  The name of Martin is not mentioned, but several of his works are unmistakably described.  “His towered architecture