Cadmus and the Dragon

John Martin was one of the most important nineteenth-century Romantic painters working in Britain and was known for his dramatic interpretations of classical and biblical themes. The baroque drama of Cadmus and the Dragon evokes the Romantic fascination with distant times and cultures; in this example, the scene is from Ovid's Metamorphoses and is Martin's earliest-known depiction of a classical subject. It closely follows Book III, which describes how Cadmus, sent by his parents to search for his sister Europa, consulted the Oracle of Delphi and learned that his destiny was to start a great city, the future Thebes. The Oracle told Cadmus that he should build the new city on the spot where a certain cow laid down to rest. The cow was to be sacrificed in a ritual requiring water from a sacred spring, but the men Cadmus sent to fetch the water were slaughtered by a dragon, offspring of the god Ares, that guarded the spring.

In style, the painting looks back to the bravura seventeenth-century landscapes of Salvator Rosa and to his contemporary Claude Lorrain's classical heroic landscapes. Cadmus and the Dragon was painted one year after Martin's Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion (now in the Saint Louis Art Museum), which introduced the artist's successful formula of a tiny but heroic figure placed in a landscape with Romantic overtones. The small but muscular Cadmus fights a dragon whose gigantic claws nearly encircle his body. Reminiscent of Henry Fuseli's nightmarish visions, Cadmus and the Dragon poses its two combatants in a dark, rocky landscape illuminated by a vivid shaft of light.