John Martin's The Great Day of His Wrath (1853), the central panel of his apocalyptic triptych now in Tate Britain, is the most ambitious and technically extraordinary visualization of the Book of Revelation's judgment imagery produced in the 19th century. Along with its companion panels - The Last Judgment (right) and The Plains of Heaven (left) - it represents the culmination of a career devoted to depicting divine power operating at geological and cosmic scale, and it made Martin the most popular English painter of his generation.
The Biblical Source
The painting draws primarily on Revelation 6:12-17, which describes the opening of the sixth seal: a great earthquake, the sun turning black as sackcloth, the moon turning blood red, the stars falling from the sky, "the sky was rolled up like a scroll," and every mountain and island moved from its place. The kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty - "everyone, both slave and free" - hid in caves and among rocks, calling to the mountains: "Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can withstand it?" (Revelation 6:16-17). Martin translates this verbal imagery of total geological and cosmic catastrophe into paint with overwhelming effect.
The Composition
The canvas (197 x 303 cm) is organized around a vast diagonal chasm of red and gold fire into which an entire civilization is collapsing. City towers, bridges, cliffs, and masses of tiny human figures fall simultaneously into the abyss, which glows with an interior light that is both geological (lava) and infernal (hellfire). The scale is vertiginous: the human figures are microscopic relative to the landscape, emphasizing the utter insignificance of human power and construction before divine judgment. A lurid storm sky above adds to the sense of cosmic disruption.
Martin's technique was to paint the large-scale geological and atmospheric effects with virtuoso control of tone and color, then add the tiny human figures last - a decision that makes them feel swept up in forces entirely beyond their scale of comprehension. The painting is, technically, a landscape painting that happens also to be a theological statement.
The Artist
John Martin (1789-1854) was born in Northumberland, the son of a Methodist lay preacher, and grew up in an intensely biblical culture that read the language of Revelation and the Old Testament prophets as the natural vocabulary for describing historical and natural catastrophe. His early successes - Belshazzar's Feast (1820), The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum (1822), Sodom and Gomorrah (1852) - established his reputation as the painter of divine judgment. He was almost entirely self-taught and developed his distinctive style of miniaturist technique applied to maximal scale independently of the academic tradition.
He was also a serious engineering visionary, developing (largely unrealized) plans for London's drainage and railway systems. His interest in engineering scale - the relationship between human construction and geological force - fed directly into his painting's theology of the catastrophic.
Victorian Popularity and Reproduction
Martin's paintings were widely reproduced as mezzotint prints, making his imagery accessible to a mass audience. His Belshazzar's Feast was among the most widely reproduced images of the 19th century. The apocalyptic triptych, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1853 and subsequently toured throughout Britain and America, drew crowds estimated in the hundreds of thousands. His popularity reflected the Victorian evangelical culture's intense engagement with Revelation's judgment imagery and its comfort with the category of divine wrath as a cosmic force in history.
Sublimity as Theology
Martin's apocalyptic paintings operate in the tradition of the Burkean and Kantian sublime - the experience of being overwhelmed by a force that exceeds comprehension, which the 18th century theorized as a fundamental aesthetic category. Martin's contribution was to fuse this aesthetic category with specifically biblical content: the overwhelming force is not merely nature but divine judgment, and the terror it produces is simultaneously aesthetic and theological. The viewer's smallness before the canvas's catastrophic vision is a visual equivalent of Isaiah 40:22's God who "sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers."
Legacy
Martin's apocalyptic vision directly influenced 20th-century disaster cinema's visual vocabulary - the collapsing buildings, the mass of tiny fleeing figures, the geological catastrophe - and through that channel shaped the popular imagination's default image of the End Times. He remains the most important British visualizer of the Book of Revelation's imagery and a key figure in the history of apocalyptic art.