On the night of 1 February 1829, Jonathan Martin felt his way from behind Archbishop Greenfield’s effigy in the north transept of York Minster. “All was darkness: I could not see my hands before me,” he later told the court. Using bell ropes as an improvised rope ladder, he clambered into the choir, prayed awhile, gathered hassocks and selected books into piles and set them alight. “I thought it a work of merit to burn prayer-books and music books,” he explained, “but not to burn the Word of God.” Around eight the following morning flames burst through the roof. Horrific though the scene was, the people of York took to marvelling. One onlooker wrote of “an effect indescribably beautiful and grand”. Another, an enraptured lady, was moved to cry out: “What a subject for John Martin!” By then the fire-raiser was well on his way northwards to his place of origin in the Tyne valley, where he was soon arrested. At his trial back in York the following month he laughed a lot and was found insane. “I have made as much noise as Bonaparte ever did, I think,” he remarked to the court. In the lunatic asylum of Bedlam – where the Imperial War Museum now stands – he remained cheerful, drew imaginatively and gave no trouble. He died 10 years later.

Two elder brothers, William and Richard, attended his trial but, although he paid for the defending counsel, Henry Brougham (a future lord chancellor), John – seven years Jonathan’s junior – stayed in London where he had a large family, an establishment to maintain and a reputation to lose. Hadn’t Sir Thomas Lawrence once toasted him, tongue slightly in cheek, as “the most popular painter of the day”? As it was, the notorious Jonathan, the most celebrated arsonist of the age, was rivalled in fearless assertion and eccentricity by both Richard, a visionary-minded poet Bridge on the Tyne in 1789, he grew up in frontier landscape a couple of miles south of the Roman wall. His mother was pious, his father erratic and his elder brothers no doubt inspired in him notions of fervent self-expression. By 1806 he was in London, edging into artistry by executing picturesque views on china plates. He was perky, engaging, sociable, tireless, and his ambitions grew as he progressed through classical landscapes, scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and suchlike, on to the lofty plateaux of history painting, winning attention at the Royal Academy and its rival body the British Institution with increasingly startling compositions. There was Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion (tiny figure scrambling on to a rock shelf) and The Bard (tiny figure on a high rock in Snowdonia cursing the occupying army of Edward I), followed by Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still (tiny figure persuading God to halt time for long enough to get the walls of Jericho to collapse). Grander compositions followed. The Fall of Babylon (1819) and its sequel, Belshazzar’s Feast (1820), were scenes of panic in the vastnesses of what the artist assured his audience were authentic period settings. By this stage Martin had become aware of the advantages of making pictures phenomenal enough to rate entrance charges. The plagues of Egypt, the destruction of Herculaneum and Pompeii, the overthrow of Nineveh: all received the meltdown treatment. Unlike ordinary history paintings manned by statuesque protagonists, his big pictures played to a taste for disasters involving seething multitudes.

Martin enjoyed popular success for well over a decade. Discovering that the larger the picture the trickier it was to sell, he took to producing mezzotint versions, affordable for those lacking stately homes, producing them himself in his house in Allsop Terrace, near Regent’s Park. Mezzotint proved the ideal medium for him: plates roughened to hold the ink, scraped to create light. Commissioned in the 1820s to do illustrations for Paradise Lost, he produced two sets, each plate a hymn to Milton, ranging between the silvery glades of paradise and the black infinities of Satan’s underworld. Thence he surveyed the epochal past, summoning up in paint and print two of the most dramatic moments ever imagined: the breached river wall and death of Sardanapalus in The Fall of Nineveh, and the rocks tumbling amid lightning strikes and torrential swirls in The Deluge. These he worked on, coincidentally, over the months that Jonathan Martin spent dreaming up what he called his “job”, the torching of York Minster, during which time he wrote an open letter in prime Tyne dialect: “I right Oh Clargmen to you to warn you to fly from the roth to cum you who are bringing a Grevus Cors upon the Land …”

At the height of his fame, John Martin was described by an acquaintance as well spoken and dapper, making him sound like an eager minor character in early Dickens: “light primrose-coloured vest with bright metal buttons, a blue coat set off with the same, his hair carefully curled and shining with macassar. He kept to his points with a tenacity not hastily subdued.” Ardent for attention and respect, Martin moved freely in London society; he became friendly with Michael Faraday and Charles Babbage, the computer pioneer. And even after a period of setbacks – falling sales for the prints and the frustration of various projects – in 1840 he was reputable enough to attract Prince Albert to his studio, there to commission and discuss The Eve of the Deluge. This was to be the prince consort’s preferred sort of painting: foreboding picked out in admirable detail, limpid atmosphere overall. Martin’s world, a world of crusty foregrounds, of cities constructed on clean lines and bright blue distances, was a world for ever under threat. His brother William, 17 years older, had been ahead of him for decades in exercising an appetite for reordering the planet. Self-taught and wonderfully self-confident, he developed a perpetual motion mechanism