John Martin

When John Martin showed Belshazzar's Feast in London in 1821, the crowd was so thick the gallery put up a railing to hold people back from the canvas. He gave them a Babylonian hall the size of a city, with tiny figures cowering under vast architecture as fiery writing breaks out on the wall. Martin built a career on this scale of catastrophe, painting the fall of Nineveh, the great Deluge and the Day of Judgement, and reaching a huge public through cheap mezzotint prints made after the paintings.

His was a strange family. One brother, William, was a self-styled inventor and pamphleteer, and another, Jonathan, set fire to York Minster, England's great medieval cathedral, in 1829. John quietly paid for the legal defence that saved him from the gallows.

For all his visions of ruined cities, Martin spent decades and much of his money on very practical plans to give London clean water and proper sewers, drawing up scheme after scheme that officials admired and never built. He died in 1854 on the Isle of Man, where he had gone to recover after a stroke the year before.