Conrad Martens (21 March 1801 – 21 August 1878) was an English-born landscape painter active on HMS Beagle from 1833 to 1834. He arrived in Australia in 1835 and painted there until his death in 1878. Life and work Conrad Martens' father, J. C. H. Martens, was an Austrian-born merchant who originally came to London as Austrian Consul. Conrad was born in 1801 at Crutched Friars near Tower Hill and after his father's death in 1816 determined to pursue a career as an artist studying landscape painting under the prominent watercolourist Copley Fielding. His two brothers, John William and Henry were also artists. In 1832 Captain Blackwood of HMS Hyacinth asked him join his three-year cruise to India as a topographical artist. In Montevideo near the end of 1833 he heard Robert FitzRoy, captain of HMS Beagle, who was employed in surveying the Straits of Magellan, wanted to engage an artist to replace the ship's artist Augustus Earle who had fallen ill. In this way he joined the second voyage of HMS Beagle and stayed on board for some two years, until the schooner which accompanied them was paid off and the officer who had command of her returned to HMS Beagle, meaning there was no longer room for Martens. While on board Martens struck up a lifelong friendship with Charles Darwin who was taking part in the expedition as a self-financing gentleman naturalist and companion to the captain. Martens left the Beagle at Valparaiso in the second half of 1834 and took passage to Tahiti, and many of the South Sea islands, including New Zealand, before arriving in Sydney 1835. Martens arrived in the colony with a valuable collection of sketches which he at first intended to take back to his friend Blackwood in India, but finding his pictures were appreciated in Sydney he found constant employment and decided to remain. He went on to become one of the most proficient, prominent and prolific landscape artist in the colony. Beagle arrived in 1836, and Darwin and Captain Fitzroy commissioned a number of paintings from Beagles voyages in Tierra Del Fuego and the Pacific. Other large commissions followed, and in 1837 some of Martens' Australian watercolours were exhibited at the Royal Society in London. In 1839, however, a drought triggered an economic recession which was to last until the 1850s, and commissions became increasingly difficult to acquire. In the 1840s