The Bard

Painted around 1817, at the height of the Romantic movement, John Martin’s version of The Bard unites the drama of the poem by Thomas Gray, published in 1757, with a vision of sublime landscape. The Bard stands amid an overwhelming and powerful landscape with ominous clouds, a raging river, and dramatic cliffs evoking the sublime, a combined sense of awe and terror, in the viewer. The Bard’s disproportionate size, particularly in comparison to the advancing troops of Edward I below, makes him seem an element of the landscape, a landmark in his own right.