PROVENANCE
Private Collection, United Kingdom

Albin Martin received his formal training from English Painter John Linnell along with fellow pupils Joseph Mallord William Turner and David Cox. He arrived in Auckland from Italy in 1851. While managing his farm in East Tamaki he painted and sketched the Auckland isthmus in a style many compared to that of French painter Claude Lorraine. Albin Martin was a founding member of the Auckland Society of Artists and later treasurer for the Auckland Society of Arts and also served on a committee to judge a competition for a design for the then new Auckland Library and Auckland City Art Gallery. Martins work differed significantly from the topographical style of landscape realism produced by his contemporaries J B C Hoyte and Alfred Sharpe who were also working in Auckland. Martin was a vocal critic of the movement to produce a distinctively New Zealand art. Yet his links with well-known artists in England gave a kind of confidence to the fledgeling art community in Auckland at this time. His original intention of farming had brought little reward, but he had lived by his ideals and typified the cultured gentleman immigrant. He died at Auckland on 7 August 1888, survived by his wife, who died in 1911. Together they had eight children. His works rarely appear on the market.