About this work
The canvas confronts you with annihilation. The last families and animals are shown dying in a mass of dark blues, greens, and blacks, engulfed by the Noahitic flood.
A sliver of white light at the upper centre looks as if it is being squeezed out of existence by the surrounding darkness, its rays falling on writhing death and destruction below.
The scene draws on the story of Noah's Ark — and you can barely make out the ark itself, almost swallowed by the composition's centre.
Painted on a square canvas — a format Turner had only taken up in the final years of his career — the work showcases his dramatic use of the vortex , pulling the eye inward into a churning void. The animal forms in the painting are startlingly abstract: from one angle they resemble alligators, from another, horses. Depending on where the viewer stands, they half-create the image themselves, the forms sliding into one another as you shift your perspective.
The painting first appeared at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1843 , as the companion piece to *Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory) — The Morning after the Deluge.*
In these companion pictures, Turner opposes cool and warm colours and their contrasting emotional associations, as described by Goethe in his *Farbenlehre* (Theory of Colours).
Turner had absorbed Goethe's theory after its English translation appeared in 1840, particularly the idea that the creation of colour depends on the interplay of light and dark — a direct rejection of Newton's seven-colour model, arguing instead that every colour is an individualised combination of light and darkness.
In the margins of his own copy of the theory, Turner noted a gap in Goethe's thinking on shadow, and held that darkness was not a passive absence of light but an active optical force in tension with it.
At the time, Turner's square canvases were his most controversial works, famously subjected to a hail of abuse in the press. They are now understood as the most radical paintings of his final decade.
This is not a work for a room that wants to be comfortable. It commands a wall where it can be given space — a high-ceilinged study, a spare and darkly painted sitting room, or a minimalist hallway where its churning forms have room to breathe. Goethe held that darkness is not merely the absence of light but has its own presence and significance, and Turner's use of dark tones and dramatic
