Start by counting the people. John Martin’s The Great Day of His Wrath, painted between 1851 and 1853 and now at Tate Britain, has two knots of bodies in its bottom corners that are big enough to count: at least eight on the left, a woman in a red dress lying with her head on her arm among them, and at least seven on the right, one man still on his feet with an arm thrown up at the sky. Past those corners the count stops working. Up the slopes the people shrink to a few strokes of paint each and then to sparks, and above them the mountains are breaking open and a whole city is tipping into the gap.
A painting of the end of the world shouldn’t be this good to look at, and the reason it is has a name: the sublime in art, beauty that works because the thing in front of you could destroy you, seen from somewhere it can’t. John Martin spent his whole career building that distance into the canvas.
What is the sublime in art?
The idea is old, but the version painters actually worked from in Martin’s time came from Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in London in 1757, and it goes straight at fear.
“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”
Edmund Burke, Part One, Section VII
Then comes the condition that makes it bearable. “When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful.” The distance is the whole thing. A mountain falling on you is terror. A mountain falling in a gilt frame, with a rope between you and the canvas, is the sublime.
Burke set it against beauty point by point. Beauty is “comparatively small”, “smooth and polished”, “light and delicate”, while the great is “rugged and negligent”, “dark and gloomy”, “solid, and even massive”. His summary is the line people still quote: “terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime.”
He gave painters a measuring stick too. “Greatness of dimension is a powerful cause of the sublime,” and height works harder than length: “a hundred yards of even ground will never work such an effect as a tower a hundred yards high, or a rock or mountain of that altitude.” Read that next to Martin and it sounds like a brief. When the Tate explains the word sublime in its glossary of art terms, the picture at the top is The Great Day of His Wrath.
John Martin’s paintings and the terror of scale
John Martin was born in 1789 in a one-room cottage at Haydon Bridge in Northumberland, was apprenticed to a coachbuilder in Newcastle to paint coats of arms on carriages, and moved to London in 1806, painting glass and china for a living. The Tate’s curator Martin Myrone says he had no conventional art training and “very few connections in the London art world”, and that he made his name by exhibiting “works that were going to get critical attention”.
The first was Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion, at the Royal Academy in 1812. Myrone calls it “an impressive and extremely red painting”, and on walls hung frame to frame it stood out because landscapes were “normally green, or brown, or grey”. Martin puts its hero, sent to find the waters that wipe out memory, at the very bottom of the canvas, hauling himself over a ledge with nothing under his feet.
A man twenty centimetres long on a canvas almost two metres high, and everything else is rock, water and weather. Martin used that grammar for the rest of his life. Laura Cumming, reviewing the Tate’s 2011 retrospective for The Observer, described it as “colossal skies dwarfing whichever culture is seconds from destruction”, where “huge armies are pitted against tiny solo figures”. Make the person small enough and everything around him becomes the threat.
Belshazzar’s Feast and Pandemonium: architecture built to fall
Martin’s next move was architecture. Belshazzar’s Feast comes from the Book of Daniel: the king of Babylon drinks from the vessels taken from the Temple in Jerusalem, a hand writes on the wall, the prophet Daniel reads the words as the end of the kingdom, and that night Belshazzar is killed. Martin’s large version won a £200 prize at the British Institution in 1821 and had to be railed off from the crowds. In those same years Goya’s Black Paintings were going onto the walls of a house outside Madrid, made for no crowd at all. The smaller version below, dated 1820, is at the Yale Center for British Art.
Martin claimed at one point that his palace “was meant to be a mile long”. Burke had warned against exactly that: “too great a length in buildings destroys the purpose of greatness”. But he also explained why a colonnade works on the eye. Each pillar in “a colonnade of uniform pillars planted in a right line” “repeats impulse after impulse, and stroke after stroke” until the mind is given “a grand or sublime conception”. Martin’s hall runs on that engine, rank after rank of identical pillars.
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The hall
Open to the sky, columns down both sides, the Tower of Babel and a ziggurat in the storm behind it, and the moon showing through a break in the cloud.
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The writing
MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN in the Book of Daniel. The words burn on the far left wall and throw their light across the hall.
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Daniel
In black, in the middle of the feast, one arm out toward the writing as he reads it.
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Belshazzar
Crowned, on the right, recoiling among his courtiers.
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The colonnade
Pillar after pillar in a straight line, running back into the light.
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The tower
Babel in lightning, higher than anything in the hall, a building the Bible already knows will fall.
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The guests
Down the hall the feast shrinks to dabs of white, so you read the size of the room in its people.
Twenty years later he built the same kind of place in hell. Pandemonium, shown at the Royal Academy in 1841, is the capital of the fallen angels in Milton’s Paradise Lost, the palace that “Rose like an exhalation” out of the ground of hell. Satan stands on a rock in the right foreground with his shield and spear, a small figure in front of a façade that runs across most of the canvas.
The Great Day of His Wrath: what it means
The Great Day of His Wrath is the end of the world as the Book of Revelation tells it, at the breaking of the sixth seal, and Martin follows the text closely. In the King James words it reads almost like a shot list.
“And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood … And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us.”
Revelation 6:12–16
The people are doing what the verse says, asking the rocks to fall on them, and the rocks are coming: the mountains “transformed into rolling waves of solid rock, crushing any buildings that lie in their wake”, in the Tate’s description, and “an entire city being torn up and thrown into the abyss”. Martin’s son Leopold said his father found the image on a night journey through the Black Country, the iron and coal country of the Midlands, and the historian F. D. Klingender read the painting as the industrial landscape in disguise.
It was never meant to hang alone. It’s the right-hand panel of three, with The Last Judgement in the centre and The Plains of Heaven on the left, so the wall runs from a calm valley of the saved, through the judgement, into this. It is the plan of a medieval Doom painting, heaven on your left and hell on your right, spread across three canvases.
Left
Centre
Right
In the centre panel the saved stand on the left, among them portraits of Shakespeare, Newton and James Watt, the damned fall on the right, and a railway train with its carriages marked London and Paris goes over the edge into the pit.
The Last Judgement triptych, on tour like a blockbuster
Martin had a stroke in November 1853 and died on the Isle of Man in February 1854, seven days after the three went on show in Newcastle, where he had served his apprenticeship.
Then they went on the road, as advertisements for Charles Mottram’s engravings, through English cities, Dublin and New York. A handbill sold the show for sixpence, “each picture 13 feet by 10, and valued at 8,000 guineas”, “the most sublime and extraordinary pictures in the world!” Myrone says they were shown under dimmed lights, in music halls and theatres as well as galleries, sometimes with “a moustachioed gentleman who would point out the details of the paintings and dramatise their content”.
When they reached St George’s Hall in Bradford they had already been “inspected by upwards of two million persons”, and by 1861 the claim was eight million. Myrone’s arithmetic on that number is “more than 1 in 3 people had seen these pictures”. Painting as an evening out, lit in the dark with a voice beside it, is a cinema audience before there was cinema.
- 1853A stroke in November takes Martin’s speech and the use of his right arm.
- 1854On show at the Victoria Rooms in Newcastle from 10 February. Martin dies on the 17th.
- 1855London, the Great Hall of Commerce on Threadneedle Street.
- 1856–57Dublin in March, then New York. Mottram’s engravings are published in London and New York.
- 1860London again, at Mabley’s in the Strand.
- 1872Hexham, a few miles from Haydon Bridge, where Martin was born.
- 1878–79Australia: a commercial gallery in Melbourne, then the Sydney International Exhibition.
- 1890sA dingy room at Alexandra Palace. Boys use them as targets for their catapults.
- 1935Sold at auction for seven pounds. The Last Judgement ends up cut into four strips for a screen.
- 1945The Tate buys The Great Day of His Wrath.
- 1974Charlotte Frank’s bequest. The three hang together again.
- 2011Tate Britain: a theatre, and a sound and light show.
Then taste moved on and the paintings didn’t. In the 1890s boys used them as targets for their catapults at Alexandra Palace. In 1935 the three sold at auction for £7, and a woman who came to own The Last Judgement cut it into four strips to decorate a screen; the canvas still shows the three joins. In 2011 Tate Britain hung them in a theatre and ran a sound and light show over them, which Myrone tied to “a much more contemporary experience of blockbuster entertainment”.
John Martin and the movies
The comparison everyone reaches for is film. The Tate’s 2011 show said his landscapes have “an enduring influence on today’s cinematic and digital fantasy landscapes”, and Laura Cumming went further: “Film directors have acknowledged the immense debt, from DW Griffith to Cecil B DeMille and Roland Emmerich.” Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) tells the fall of Belshazzar’s Babylon, the story of the painting that first made Martin famous.
The clearest witness is Ray Harryhausen, who made the stop-motion creatures of Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans and kept a big collection of Martin’s engravings. In a film the Tate made with him in 2011 he said, “I always say he’s one of the first art directors of motion picture, because so many of the early art directors would use his compositions.” He also described how Martin built depth: “he would have the foreground very dark and medium brown and then a very light background.” Belshazzar’s Feast runs in exactly that order, dark figures at the front, the gold of the hall, the light at the far end.
Most of that line is dashed. The solid part runs through prints, the engravings Harryhausen still kept more than a century after Martin made them, and through the old bargain Burke described: a catastrophe at a safe distance, in the dark, with a crowd around you.
APOCALYPSE, from the XPRMTS Series 001 prints, makes the same bargain at screen size. A blurred blue head sits inside a grid of television screens showing storm cloud, churning sea, fire and a mushroom cloud, and its words end “The world will not let you look away.” Martin put the end of the world behind a rope for a sixpenny crowd; here it arrives the way most catastrophes now do, on a screen, close enough to see and too far to touch.
Frequently asked questions
What is the sublime in art?
It’s the mix of fear and pleasure you get from something vast, dark or dangerous when you’re safe from it. Edmund Burke’s Enquiry of 1757 made terror its “ruling principle”, and it runs all through Romantic painting. Turner’s sea storms belong to it, and so do Martin’s apocalypses.
What is the difference between the sublime and the beautiful?
For Burke beauty is small, smooth and founded on pleasure, and the sublime is vast, dark and founded on pain. His test case is the ocean. A plain as wide as the sea never fills the mind the same way, because “the ocean is an object of no small terror”.
Where is The Great Day of His Wrath?
At Tate Britain in London, which bought it in 1945. The other two panels came to the Tate in 1974, so all three are in the same collection.
Why was John Martin called Mad Martin?
The name belonged first to his brother Jonathan, a preacher who set fire to York Minster in 1829 and spent the rest of his life in Bethlem Hospital. By the twentieth century, as Martin’s reputation sank, the nickname had stuck to the painter.
Read next
- Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, one small figure, an infinite landscape, and the ships Friedrich painted out of the Monk by the Sea.
- The paintings inside Elden Ring, Bosch, Doré and the sublime in Dark Souls.
- What is a Doom painting? Medieval hell from the church wall to DOOM Eternal, with Pandemonium as the moment hell became a city.
- Goya’s Black Paintings, art made for no audience, in the same decades as Martin.
References
- Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, London, Dodsley, 1757; quoted from the text in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. 1: Part I, Section VII; Part II, Sections II, VII and X; Part III, Section XXVII; Part IV, Section XIII: gutenberg.org
- Martin Myrone, “John Martin’s Last Judgement Triptych: The Apocalyptic Sublime in the Age of Spectacle”, in Nigel Llewellyn and Christine Riding (eds.), The Art of the Sublime, Tate Research Publication, January 2013: tate.org.uk
- Martin Myrone, “John Martin: Curatorial walkthrough”, TateShots, Tate, 2011: tate.org.uk
- “John Martin: Apocalypse”, Tate Britain, 21 September 2011 to 15 January 2012: tate.org.uk
- Ray Harryhausen on John Martin, TateShots, Tate, 22 September 2011: tate.org.uk
- Laura Cumming, “John Martin: Apocalypse, review”, The Observer, 25 September 2011: theguardian.com
- Tate, catalogue entry for John Martin, The Last Judgement and The Plains of Heaven (T01927, T01928), from The Tate Gallery 1974–6: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions; and summary for The Great Day of His Wrath (N05613), Frances Fowle, 2000: tate.org.uk
- Tate, “Sublime”, art term: tate.org.uk
- William Feaver, The Art of John Martin, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1975; F. D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, 1947; both as discussed in Charles F. Stuckey’s review of Feaver, The Art Bulletin 58, no. 4 (1976), pp. 630–632.
- Christopher Wood, Victorian Painting, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999.
- Saint Louis Art Museum, Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion, 1566:1983: slam.org
- Yale Center for British Art, Belshazzar’s Feast, B1981.25.440: collections.britishart.yale.edu
- Musée du Louvre, Le Pandemonium, RF 2006 21: collections.louvre.fr
- The Holy Bible, King James Version, Revelation 6:12–17; Daniel 5.
- Images: Tate (via Google Arts & Culture), Yale Center for British Art and Saint Louis Art Museum, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Pandemonium photographed at the Louvre by Stéphane Magnenat, a faithful reproduction of a public domain painting, via Wikimedia Commons.