The End of the World

The End of the World, later to be commonly known as The Great Day of His Wrath, is an 1851-1853 oil painting on canvas by the English painter John Martin. According to Frances Carey, the painting shows the "destruction of Babylon and the material world by natural cataclysm". This painting, Frances Carey holds, is a response to the emerging industrial scene of London as a metropolis in the early nineteenth century, and the original growth of the Babylon civilization and its final destruction. Some other scholars such as William Feaver see the painting as "the collapse of Edinburgh in Scotland". Charles F. Stuckey is skeptical of the link with Edinburgh. According to the Tate, the painting depicts a portion of Revelation 6, a chapter from the New Testament.

Leopold Martin, John Martin's son, said that his father found the inspiration for this painting on a night journey through the Black Country. This comment has led some scholars to hold that the rapid industrialization of England in the early nineteenth century influenced Martin. According to the Tate, Martin got his inspiration from the book of Revelation.

Some authors have used the painting as the front cover for their books, examples include Mass of the Apocalypse and Studies in the Book of Revelation. Michael Freeman, Supernumerary Fellow and Lecturer in Human Geography at Mansfield College, describes the painting as follows:

Storms and volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and other natural disasters 'swept like tidal waves through early nineteenth-century periodicals, broadsheets and panoramas'. Catastrophic and apocalyptic visions acquired a remarkable common currency, the Malthusian spectre a constant reminder of the need for atonement. For some onlookers, Martin's most famous canvases of divine revelation seemed simultaneously to encode new geological and astronomical truths. This was ... powerfully demonstrated in The Great Day of his Wrath (1852), in which the Edinburgh of James Hutton, with its grand citadel, hilltop terraces and spectacular volcanic landscape, explodes outwards and appears suspended upside-down, flags still flying from its buildings and before crashing head-on into the valley below.

According to the Tate Gallery, the United Kingdom's national museum of British and Modern Art, the painting closely follows a portion of Revelation 6, a chapter from the New Testament of the Bible:

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 stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.
And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.
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, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb:
For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?