About this work
First exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1843 , this is one of Turner's most philosophically charged and visually radical canvases. Painted in oil on a perfectly square canvas measuring 79 × 79 cm , the composition revolves around a blazing vortex of yellow and gold that consumes almost the entire picture plane. The form of the painting is circular, symbolising the construction of the human eye — a deliberate subversion of conventional pictorial space. The figure at the centre is hard to see, challenging vision by its refusal of clarity; it is in fact Moses writing the Book of Genesis.
At the lower right, a crowd of drowned ghosts reinforces the painting's spectral, layered sense of time.
The dominant yellow is a direct reference to Goethe's *Theory of Colours*, which identifies yellow as the first colour transmitted from light — radiant, yes, but also unstable: Turner attached yellow to a light that is subject to change; the morning-sun quality of the colour is transient.
The painting depicts the aftermath of the Great Flood as told in Genesis , but its ambitions reach well beyond biblical narrative. Turner had long engaged with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's *Farbenlehre* (Theory of Colours, 1810), absorbing Goethe's ideas about the relationship between light and darkness and depicting that tension across a number of his paintings.
He uses Goethe's framework — a rejection of Newton's Seven Colour Theory — to express the belief that every colour is an individual combination of light and darkness.
The work is paired with *Shade and Darkness — the Evening of the Deluge*, also from 1843; together, the two canvases oppose cool and warm colours and their contrasting emotional associations, exactly as Goethe described in his *Farbenlehre*. This diptych marks the apex of Turner's lifelong inquiry into colour as feeling rather than description — a point at which landscape, theology, and optical science converge entirely.
Hung in a room with strong, directional natural light, this print becomes almost luminous — the warm yellows and amber tones shifting perceptibly through the day in a way that feels entirely fitting for a work about the transience of light itself. It belongs in a space where looking is slow and sustained: a study, a quiet sitting room, or anywhere a viewer wants art that rewards returning attention. It speaks most to those drawn to the intersection of intellect and sensation — viewers who find abstraction more honest
