John Martin's Last Judgement Engraving

A large cedar framed Victorian steel engraving, 'The Last Judgement', after the original by John Martin painted in 1853, showing The Last Judgement, with God determining the ultimate fate of the good and the wicked at the end of the world. This is one of a set of three large paintings and was the final artistic enterprise of the most celebrated and controversial painter of biblical disaster in the nineteenth century, John Martin (1789?1854). The series was completed only months before his death. Sent out on an exhibition tour that encompassed the whole of Britain, as well as Ireland, North America and eventually Australia, they became the most widely seen of his pictures and reached an audience which may have numbered in the millions. They were also reproduced as engravings which were distributed worldwide, extending their reach even further. Relaying the end of the world prophesied by St John the Divine in the biblical book of Revelation through vastly conceived and catastrophically overwhelming landscape scenery, they have been cast in modern scholarship as among the exemplars of the nineteenth century apocalyptic sublime