Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion

John Martin was 23 and barely known when he showed this at London's Royal Academy in 1812. It was his first attempt at the vast, vertiginous kind of picture that would make his name. The tiny figure clawing up the rock is Sadak, a hero from Tales of the Genii, a collection of invented Eastern fables published in 1764. His wife has been seized by a sultan, and to win her back he must fetch water from a spring at the world's end. Martin said he finished the whole thing in a month, and it sold for 50 guineas. The original then vanished for generations, known only from a smaller copy, until it turned up in Sweden and reached Saint Louis in 1983.