John Martin's The Great Day of His Wrath, painted around 1851 to 1853, depicts the end of the world from the Book of Revelation. Whole mountains are torn loose and hurled through a red-black sky; a city is flung into a collapsing chasm; tiny human figures fall with the rock into the abyss. Martin built his reputation on these vast apocalyptic canvases, staged like theatre and lit as if by furnace.

The painting is one of a trio of large Judgement pictures Martin made at the end of his life. In an England transformed by industry, his cataclysms read both as biblical prophecy and as a darker premonition of what the new machine age might unleash. The work is held by Tate Britain and is a high point of the Romantic apocalyptic imagination.