he turned to lithographs, which allowed him to sell the same work many times over – his View of Sydney from the North Shore was especially popular. Conrad Martens married Jane Carter, of Welsh heritage and the only child of William and Jane Carter at St James Church, Sydney, on 9 March 1837. Jane's father, a private barrister and First Master in Chancery of the Supreme Court of New South Wales had purchased one of Martens' paintings, View of Tahiti in September 1836. In late 1851 Martens sailed to Brisbane then travelling back by road across the Great Dividing Range to the Darling Downs, then south through New England to Sydney. En route, he lodged with squatters and pastoralists, drawing their houses and properties, and hoping for commissions. The plan succeeded, and Martens was eventually commissioned to paint over seventy watercolours, nearly forty of which are still known today. Between 1841 and 1852 he travelled through the Newcastle and Hunter Valley regions with much of his collection digitized at the State Library of New South Wales. He exhibited at the Victorian Fine Arts Society in Melbourne in 1853, and at the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1855. Eventual improvement in the Australian economy in the later 1850s (largely due to the discovery of gold) led to an increase in significant commissions. A famous painting is North Head, Sydney Harbour (1854). In 1862 he received a letter from Darwin, and replied congratulating him on the success of On the Origin of Species. He sent Darwin a watercolour of Brisbane River and exhibited at the International Exhibition in London. In 1863 he became Assistant Librarian in the Parliamentary Library, securing his financial position, but severely curtailing the time he could spend on artistic work. Nevertheless, he exhibited at the Paris International Exhibition in 1867 and found time to tutor aspiring Australian talent such as Mary Gedye. He received his first public commission in 1872, from the Victorian Gallery (later National Gallery of Victoria), for a watercolour of Apsley Falls on Waterloo (Pastoral) Station, near Walcha, New South Wales, and a second similar commission in 1875 from the New South Wales Academy of Arts (later Art Gallery of New South Wales), of whose Council he became a member in 1877. From the later 1860s Martens suffered from angina, and he died from a heart attack on 21 August 1878. He was buried at a