Who Painted John Martin's Portrait?

John Martin was a very modest man, and one with limited financial resources. So I never looked for a portrait. However, suddenly one turned up, a very large and impressive one, hung on the wall of the meeting room in the Newry Town Hall.

Who could have painted this very imposing portrait? The painting itself provided no answer, as it is unsigned. I'm vastly too curious not to at least attempt to uncover the artist.

So what clues could I pick up to help in any search? From looking at John's appearance, I could see that his beard had started to turn white. From existing photographs, I knew this happened around 1867 or so. That gave a useful hint about when it was painted.

This mystery painter had to be a young artist starting his career, as John had little money to pay for such a large painting. So who was painting in Ireland at that time? Wikipedia had the answer, providing a list of Irish painters of the time, and gave examples of their work.

I had gone down the entire list before I came to the name of a young artist, who painted portraits in the style of John's painting. I was stunned to see who the match was, John Butler Yeats.

This idea seemed an unlikely long shot, unless I could document some sort of connection between Yeats and Martin. That turned out to be surprisingly easy. Yeats lived in Dublin and had been a practicing lawyer, working with Isaac Butt. Isaac Butt was someone John knew well, as he had represented John in his 1848 trial. Certainly John and Yeats had met when Yeats was a successful lawyer..

In 1867, Yeats suddenly ended his law career and moved to London to study art. This was the time he learned to paint in oils, the medium of the Martin painting. Unfortunately, Yeats didn't keep records of his paintings, so no documentation existed to support my theory. But in reading about Yeat's life, I discovered some supporting hints. Yeats was always in need of money, so his early work often sold for just a few pounds. John was a charitable man and could afford to sit for a painting to help out a friend. Also Yeats wasn't pleased with most of his early works, and so he didn't sign them.

After a year of study in London, Yeats returned for a short time to execute some commissions that Butt had arranged for him. This is the most likely time and place the painting was done. Yeats talked while he worked, so often the subjects of his paintings were looking at him, as in John's portrait.  Yeats enjoyed doing portraits of his friends. As he put it, "Portrait painting with me is friendship, or it might be hatred, but I must have a real personal interest in whom I paint." He strove to reveal the soul of his subjects.

There can be no absolute certainly as to the identity of the painter. Only an examination of the painting by an art expert could add more substance to my theory. But in the meantime, this painting is something for Newry residents to treasure.