Top 10 John Martin Paintings of Biblical Judgment, Explained

Martin repeatedly gives us a human figure small enough to lose among the rocks, then a city large enough to make that person’s ambitions look absurd. We can admire the architecture before discovering how little protection it offers. The pleasure of looking and the fear of what happens next arrive together.

Art historians call this territory the sublime: beauty entangled with awe and terror. Martin makes it unusually easy to understand. You enjoy the view while being extremely pleased to remain outside the frame. 1

There is another reason to look closely. His spectacular settings contain particular arguments: about a ruler refusing to release enslaved people, a king misusing sacred objects, or wealth that cannot buy its owner another minute. The Bible supplies more than an excuse for impressive weather.

The story: At the opening of the sixth seal in Revelation, an earthquake and upheavals in the heavens send the powerful and powerless alike looking for somewhere to hide (Revelation 6:12–17).

The sky receded like a scroll being rolled up, and every mountain and island was moved from its place.

Revelation 6:14 · BSB

Look at the city riding the enormous rock mass on the right. Martin has put the buildings somewhere that buildings have no business being: on a piece of landscape tipping into the abyss. The catastrophe reaches beneath civilisation’s foundations. Even the ground has become unreliable.

That detail makes this more unsettling than a burning city. A fire leaves open the possibility of somewhere else to run. Here the places of refuge are coming apart too. Revelation lists kings, commanders, the rich, slaves, and free people among those seeking shelter; all the social distinctions survive just long enough to prove equally useless.

Tate places the painting within Martin’s three-part vision of judgment. Its companions are The Last Judgement and The Plains of Heaven, so this violently collapsing world belongs to a larger story that also includes salvation. We will come back to that. Martin has not finished with us. 2

The story: At a banquet in Babylon, King Belshazzar drinks from vessels taken from Jerusalem’s temple; mysterious writing appears, and Daniel explains the judgment against his kingdom (Daniel 5).

you have been weighed on the scales and found deficient.

Daniel 5:27 · BSB, excerpt

Belshazzar has borrowed the wrong tableware. The vessels are sacred objects taken from the Jerusalem temple, and he uses them while praising gods made of materials that cannot see, hear, or understand. Daniel’s rebuke is sharper than a complaint about bad manners: the king has failed to honour the God who holds his breath in His hand.

Martin gives this astonishing lapse in judgment an appropriately astonishing venue. The architecture runs away into the distance, multiplying the scale of the king’s self-importance. Then a message interrupts the entire performance. All that space, all those guests, and nobody at court can make the problem go away.

The composition caused a different crowd problem when exhibited in London in 1821. The British Museum records that spectators pressed in so enthusiastically that the painting needed a protective cordon. The painted guests had reason to panic; the public could not get close enough. The version reproduced here is Yale’s smaller canvas, dated 1820, rather than the monumental exhibition painting. 3 4

The story: After Pharaoh refuses to release the Israelites, Moses stretches his staff toward heaven and a devastating storm of hail and lightning strikes Egypt (Exodus 9:13–35).

the LORD sent thunder and hail, and lightning struck the earth.

Exodus 9:23 · BSB, excerpt

Martin did his architectural homework before arranging the destruction. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, notes that he used early illustrated publications about Egyptian monuments when building this setting. The result gives Pharaoh a civilisation impressive enough to make his refusal feel spectacularly overconfident. 5

Find Moses and Aaron at the left of the foreground terrace. They occupy remarkably little space beside the buildings. Yet the action begins with Moses’ raised staff, while the monumental city can do nothing to stop what follows. The people who look most powerful have lost control of the scene.

There is a detail in Exodus that the lightning can easily make us forget: Egypt was warned. Officials who took the warning seriously brought their servants and livestock indoors; others left them in the fields (Exodus 9:20–21). That gives the painting a more demanding question than “How frightening is this storm?” It asks what happens when a warning is heard, understood, and still dismissed.

The story: After the Israelites cross the sea, the returning waters overwhelm the Egyptian chariots and horsemen pursuing them (Exodus 14:26–31).

The waters flowed back and covered the chariots and horsemen

Exodus 14:28 · BSB, excerpt

“Host” here means army. We have left Belshazzar’s dinner party, though royal decision-making has not noticeably improved.

The wave occupies the space where a conventional battle painting might put its hero. The figures on the rocky edge are tiny beside it. Exodus describes a military force overtaken by the very passage through which its intended victims have escaped; Martin lets the water dominate the account of that reversal.

The medium makes the work even more surprising. This is a painting on paper, combining watercolour and oil paint with ink and scraping out over black chalk. Those brilliant breaks in the darkness belong to an artist manipulating a physical surface, well before anyone could ask a visual-effects department for another wave. 6

The film comparison has a real basis. Getty’s exhibition of this work explicitly explored Martin’s influence on filmmakers including Cecil B. DeMille and Ray Harryhausen. It is easy to recognise the attraction: a vast event, a clear threat, and human beings small enough to make the audience feel the scale. 6

The story: During the battle to defend Gibeon, Joshua calls for the sun and moon to stand still while the Lord fights for Israel (Joshua 10:6–14).

“O sun, stand still over Gibeon, O moon, over the Valley of Aijalon.”

Joshua 10:12 · BSB, excerpt

Joshua needs more daylight. Most commanders would consider this a scheduling problem outside their authority.

Martin makes the request feel simultaneously audacious and almost lost in the landscape. Joshua stands on a rocky projection, an arm lifted toward the sky, while the battle spreads far below. The sun appears through the clouds at the upper right; a storm bears down on the other side of the picture.

That storm matters. The biblical account says that more of the fleeing enemy died from hailstones than from Israel’s swords (Joshua 10:11). This painting belongs in a discussion of divine judgment and deliverance, even though it depicts neither the Flood nor the end of the world.

The architecture deserves a second look too. The National Gallery of Art identifies domes and a colosseum among Martin’s enormous buildings. This is an imagined ancient city assembled for dramatic effect, rather than a reliable reconstruction of biblical Gibeon. Martin gives Joshua the miracle; he gives himself considerable freedom with the skyline. 7

The story: Ezekiel announces judgment against Tyre after the trading city celebrates Jerusalem’s downfall as an opportunity for its own prosperity (Ezekiel 26).

when I raise up the deep against you so that the mighty waters cover you

Ezekiel 26:19 · BSB, excerpt

Tyre’s offence has a particularly recognisable sound. In Ezekiel 26:2, Jerusalem’s ruin looks like good news for business. A rival has fallen; surely the profits will now flow elsewhere. Tyre sees an opening in the market. Ezekiel hears a city celebrating its neighbour’s destruction.

Martin makes the sea answer. In the foreground, a woman in an ornate boat raises her arms amid the breaking water; the commercial city behind her is losing its buildings and ships to the very element on which a port depends.

The Toledo Museum of Art identifies verse 19 as the inspiration for this inundation. That distinction is useful: Martin is visualising prophetic language, not documenting the weather on the day an ancient city fell. Ezekiel also names Nebuchadnezzar and describes siege warfare elsewhere in the chapter. The painting chooses the image that can swallow the whole horizon. 1

Once you know the opening accusation, those waves mean more than an artist enjoying himself with white paint. The city's confidence in its own advantage has become part of the disaster.

The story: Lot and his family flee as fire and sulfur fall on Sodom and Gomorrah; his wife looks back and becomes a pillar of salt (Genesis 19:15–29).

Run for your lives! Do not look back

Genesis 19:17 · BSB, excerpt

Start at the right edge, with Lot and his daughters escaping along the rocky ground. Then look back toward the small, pale, upright figure nearer the burning city: the detail that gives the instruction its terrible consequence. The enormous spectacle pulls our eyes in the direction the fugitives have been told to avoid.

There is a revealing complication in the painter’s life. Martin also designed practical improvements to the world he so often imagined destroying. The Laing’s collection commentary records proposals for the Thames and London’s railway connections, as well as a safety lamp for coal mines. 8

The same museum commentary suggests that this painting’s conflagration can recall the mining explosions familiar to Martin’s industrial region. That is a modern scholarly reading, not a documented statement from the artist that he painted one particular accident.

It nevertheless gives the fire another dimension. Martin’s interest in catastrophe coexisted with efforts to make everyday life safer. Having spent so much time imagining what could go wrong, perhaps he was a useful person to have thinking about a safety lamp.

The story: Before the Flood, God warns Noah of the coming destruction and tells him to enter the ark with his household (Genesis 7:1–4).

For seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights

Genesis 7:4 · BSB, excerpt

This is the quietest painting in the selection, which is precisely why it belongs. The landscape still offers light, distance, and room to breathe. We know the title. The people within the landscape have to live through what it announces.

The picture also comes with unusually distinguished creative input. According to Martin’s son Leopold, Prince Albert suggested expanding the artist’s earlier Deluge into a trilogy, adding a scene before the disaster and another after it. The Royal Collection’s published research preserves that account and records Albert’s purchase of The Eve of the Deluge for £350 in 1841. Royal feedback could evidently extend to requesting a prequel. 9

Martin painted this work in 1840, six years after The Deluge. The order of creation runs backwards from the order of the story, giving us hindsight twice over: we recognise what is coming, and the painter has already shown it happening.

Here the warning has not yet become the event. That interval is the painting’s subject, and it asks more of our attention than another falling building would.

The story: In the Flood narrative, waters rise over a world described as corrupt and full of violence, while Noah and those with him are preserved in the ark (Genesis 6–8).

all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.

Genesis 7:11 · BSB, excerpt

If your childhood picture of Noah consisted mainly of cooperative animals, Martin has a substantial revision to offer. He gives the foreground to people caught outside the place of safety. Following the figures along the rocks brings the enormous disaster back to the scale of a body trying to survive.

But Genesis does not account for everything happening in this sky. Yale explains that Martin combined the biblical Flood with Byron’s drama Heaven and Earth and a belief in a collision involving the sun, moon, and a comet. The painting carries nineteenth-century speculation about catastrophe as well as Scripture; its cosmic mechanism is not a claim made by Genesis. 10

That mixture helped produce a picture with a life beyond British religious art. At the Paris Salon in 1835, it received a gold medal from King Louis-Philippe. Martin’s vision of catastrophe travelled well. 10

The painting leaves us in the moment of terror. The biblical story continues through the receding waters to a covenant. Holding both in mind keeps us from mistaking one overwhelming scene for the whole account.

The story: Revelation describes the dead, great and small, standing before the throne as the books are opened and judgment is given (Revelation 20:11–15).

And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne. And books were opened, and one of them was the Book of Life.

Revelation 20:12 · BSB, excerpt

By this point, you may reasonably expect Martin to have exhausted his supply of people. He has kept an enormous gathering for the last judgment itself. Christ presides above, while a gulf separates the blessed from the forces of evil falling into the depths. The painting brings several images from Revelation into one vast scene. 11

The most delightfully revealing detail is in the casting. Tate notes the conspicuously large representation of artists and poets among the saved, whose identities were supplied in an accompanying chart. Heaven, under Martin’s artistic direction, has a healthy cultural sector. Those particular guests belong to the painter’s interpretation; Revelation does not provide his list. 11

This is also the place to remember the third painting in the triptych, The Plains of Heaven. Tate describes that adjoining landscape as a vision of salvation and harmony. The mountains remain immense, but they can finally be admired without checking which way they are falling. 12

Martin’s judgment paintings can make catastrophe feel like the final word. Their complete setting gives us a reason to keep looking.

Are all John Martin’s apocalyptic paintings based on the Bible?

No. Pandemonium, for example, illustrates Milton’s Paradise Lost. The Louvre identifies its subject with Book I of that poem. Its Satan and infernal palace belong to a literary interpretation, so it should not be labelled as a straightforward illustration of a Bible passage. 13

Are The Great Day of His Wrath and The Last Judgement the same painting?

They are separate works in the same triptych, alongside The Plains of Heaven. The Great Day of His Wrath centres on cosmic upheaval associated with Revelation 6; The Last Judgement presents Christ judging and the division between the saved and the lost. 2 11

Did John Martin only paint disasters?

No. The Plains of Heaven supplies a particularly useful answer: the painter of collapsing worlds also imagined a landscape of salvation. His enormous scale could accommodate peace as well as terror. 12

Where can I see these paintings?

The works in this selection belong to collections including Tate, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Yale Center for British Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Getty, the Toledo Museum of Art, the Laing Art Gallery, and the Royal Collection. The register below identifies each work. Check the institution’s current display information before planning a visit; collection ownership does not mean a painting is always on view.