left: John Martin, "The Bard" (1817) right: GIMP, Retinex: Scale=160, ScaleDivision=6, Dynamic=2.5

Used for comparison to Illustrations by Henry Holiday to Fit 5 and Fit 8 in Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark" http://www.ipernity.com/doc/goetzkluge/34751595

Source of painting reproduction: recto, unframed http://deliver.odai.yale.edu/content/id/594cf828-e6b8-4ec4-bf14-cac45880305d/format/3

John Martin: The Bard ca. 1817

Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection http://collections.britishart.yale.edu/vufind/Record/1671616

Based on a Thomas Gray poem, inspired by a Welsh tradition that said that Edward I had put to death any bards he found, to extinguish Welsh culture; the poem depicts the escape of a single bard.

In mydailyartdisplay.wordpress.com/the-bard-by-john-martin, "Jonathan" connects the painting to like its connection to the poem The Bard written by by Thomas Gray in 1755:

   ...
   On a rock, whose haughty brow
   Frowns o’er cold Conway’s foaming flood,
   Robed in the sable garb of woe
   With haggard eyes the Poet stood;
   ...
   "Enough for me: with joy I see
   The diff’rent doom our fates assign.
   Be thine Despair and sceptred Care;
   To triumph and to die are mine."
   He spoke, and headlong from the mountain’s height
   Deep in the roaring tide he plunged to endless night.
   ...

The poem and the painting may have been an inspiration to Lewis Carroll and Henry Holiday in The Hunting of the Snark:

   545    Erect and sublime, for one moment of time.
   546        In the next, that wild figure they saw
   547    (As if stung by a spasm) plunge into a chasm,