Conrad Martens' watercolours and pencil sketches constitute an unrivalled record of the landscape of south-east Queensland in the early 1850s. I can think of no other artist who so skilfully packaged and conveyed so much information, not only about what he saw on his travels but also about how he experienced it. In this article I will discuss Martens as a recorder of the landscape under three headings — artistic, scientific and historical, and to illustrate these attributes by referring to examples of his works. Many of his works display all of these attributes, but in discussing a given work I shall resist the temptation to stray from the threefold classification of artistic, scientific and historical.