Conrad Martens

Landscape painter, born in London, UK. He studied in London, and in 1833 was appointed by the commander of HMS Beagle, Robert Fitzroy, as a topographer for the voyage with Charles Darwin from Rio de Janeiro to Valparaiso. In 1835 he arrived in Sydney, where he set up a studio and began teaching. His favourite subject was Sydney harbour, and a set of lithographs, ‘Sketches of Sydney’, was published in 1850–1. In 1863 he obtained a post in the parliamentary library, which he held for the rest of his life.

Conrad Martens (1801 - 21 August 1878) was an English born artist active in Australia from 1835.

Conrad Martens' father was a merchant who came originally to London as Austrian Consul.

In 1832 he joined the ship Hyacinth as a topographic artist. In Montevideo near the end of 1833 he met Robert FitzRoy, captain of HMS Beagle, who engaged him as a draughtsman to replace the ship's artist Augustus Earle who had fallen ill. Martens left the Beagle at Valparaiso in the second half of 1834 and took passage to Sydney via Tahiti, arriving in 1835.

Martens achieved instant success in Sydney as the most proficient and prolific landscape artist in the colony. The Beagle arrived in 1836, and Darwin and Captain Fitzroy commissioned a number of paintings from the Beagle's voyages in Tierra Del Fuego and the Pacific.

In late 1851 Martens sailed to Brisbane, travelling back across the Great Dividing Range to the Darling Downs, then south through New England to Sydney, staying en route with squatters and pastoralists, drawing their houses and properties, and hoping for commissions. The plan succeeded, and Martens was eventually commissioned to paint over seventy watercolours, nearly forty of which are still known today.

He exhibited at the Victorian Fine Arts Society in Melbourne in 1853, and at the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1855.

In 1862 he received a message from Darwin, and replied congratulating him on the success of the The Origin of Species. He sent Darwin a watercolour of Brisbane River and exhibited at the International Exhibition in London. He received his first public commission in 1872, from the Victorian Gallery (later National Gallery of Victoria), for a watercolour of Apsley Falls near Waterloo, and a second similar commission in 1875 from the New South Wales Academy of Arts (later Art Gallery of New South Wales), of whose Council he became a member in 1877.

From the later 1860s Martens suffered from angina, and he died from a heart attack on 21 August 1878.