Nowadays, Martin’s popularity is at low ebb, and his paintings are viewed with more than a little condescendence, gently despised for their meretricious kaleidoscopic peplum-like qualities. Yet in his lifetime, they enjoyed tremendous success, and were also praised by the scientific community at large where Martin actively participated.

The surgeon-geologist Gideon Algernon Mantell held him in such esteem that he called on him to draw the frontispiece of his book, so did the fossil collector Thomas Hawkins and the curator Richardson later on. What drew Mantell and the two others to Martin, and why did they turn to him for their frontispiece? More generally, what accounts for this contemporary success? What expectations of the early nineteenth-century audience did his paintings meet so well?

This paper will explore in what ways Martin’s paleoimagery picked up various contemporary discourses and absorbed the issues, anxieties and fantasies of the day, and how they sent back to the viewers what they sought, offering them a digest of their fears and concerns under the guise of entertainment so as to defuse their disturbing power.

Martin’s very popular and consensual work resonated with many different audiences. Conflicting theories—the diluvian, catastrophist, uniformitarian and plutonist theories, all at once—could be read in his paintings, such as in the Deluge; traces of scientific reflection in no way subverted religious convictions, nor did the violence depicted in his representations really threaten the established order.

In the same way as paleontology induced and crystallized fears, so did Martin’s images: fears of seeing a social order overthrown, fears of the exotic and primitive, but also more deep-seated fears of end-of-world scenarios, fears related to the precariousness, insignificance and even extinction of man. Although Martin zeroed in on contemporary preoccupations, he managed to disarm people’s anguish and alarm by entertaining them with sensational images that were hardly seditious or destabilizing. Furthermore, Martin’s imagery strengthened the order of things as viewed then, by presenting prehistoric times both as the natural locus of the origin of the nation—peopled with pseudo-dragons—, and as a foil to contemporary times.