Wait, there is a British painting in the Louvre?
There is. Several, in fact, but almost nobody comes looking for them. Which is a shame, because one of them is a vision of Hell so dramatic it looks like a film poster.
It is Pandemonium, painted in 1841 by the English artist John Martin, and the Louvre currently lists it in Room 713, Denon Wing, Level 1.
What are we looking at?
Hell, under construction. The scene comes from John Milton's long poem Paradise Lost: after being thrown out of Heaven, Satan and the fallen angels build themselves a capital and call it Pandemonium, literally "all the demons". (Yes, that is where the English word comes from. Every chaotic office meeting owes Milton a small royalty.)
Martin gives us a gigantic palace glowing with fire, a lake of lava, smoke rising into a black sky. And in front of it, tiny, a figure in armour standing on the shore. That is Satan. He is the size of your thumb.
The scale trick
That tiny figure is the whole point. Martin makes the people small so the architecture feels impossibly huge. Your eye keeps trying to measure the palace and gives up. It is the same trick blockbuster directors use when a hero walks towards an enormous spaceship, and many people think film designers learned it from painters like Martin.
So when you stand in front of it and think "this looks like a movie", you are not wrong. It is just that the movie came later.
A family with a taste for drama
People at the time called him "Mad Martin". He was not mad, but his family was not exactly calm. In 1829 his brother Jonathan set fire to York Minster, one of the great cathedrals of England, apparently after a dream. Another brother was an inventor with some very unusual ideas about perpetual motion. Next to them, painting Hell for a living sounds almost reasonable.
Why bother, with so much else to see?
Because a great Louvre visit is not only about ticking off the famous names. It is also about the moment you turn a corner and find something you never expected. Pandemonium is exactly that: a British fever dream in a museum most people associate with Leonardo and Napoleon's coronation.
Want to check it is still on display before you go? Here is the Louvre's record: Pandemonium — Musée du Louvre.
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