Conrad Martens

Conrad Martens was an English-born painter who became a leading landscape artist in colonial Australia. Born in London in 1801, he trained in the British watercolor tradition and set off to see the world. Along the way he served briefly as the artist aboard HMS Beagle, the ship carrying the young naturalist Charles Darwin, sketching the coasts of South America.

He eventually settled in Sydney, where he painted the harbor and surrounding landscape in delicate, atmospheric watercolors and oils. His views are prized both as art and as records of early Sydney. Martens is remembered as one of colonial Australia's finest landscape painters and a link to one of history's great scientific voyages.