Belshazzar's Feast

John Martin's Belshazzar's Feast of 1820 became the most celebrated British painting of its exhibition year, depicting the biblical feast from Daniel 5 at which a disembodied hand writes the king's doom on the palace wall. Martin imagined the Babylonian palace on an unprecedented architectural scale — colonnades extending into impossible distances, thousands of feasting courtiers reduced to specks of light — while a colossal celestial phenomenon fills the sky above. The painting toured Britain and America generating enormous crowds and was reproduced in engravings that made Martin internationally famous. It established the formula of his mature catastrophist style.

Martin's vast, architecturally complex composition creates a vision of Babylonian splendor at an impossible scale. The dramatic beam of supernatural light illuminating the writing on the wall against the dark vastness of the hall demonstrates his mastery of theatrical lighting effects.