Sir E. Bulwer Lytton has written this eloquent criticism: “Martin’s
‘Deluge’ is the most simple of his works; it is, perhaps, also, the most
awful. Poussin had represented before him the waste of inundation; but
not the inundation of a world. With an imagination that pierces from
effects to their ghastly and sublime agency, Martin gives, in the same
picture, a possible solution to the phenomenon he records; and in the
gloomy and perturbed heaven, you see the conjunction of the sun, the
moon, and a comet. I consider this the most magnificent alliance of
philosophy and art of which the history of painting can boast.”