Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory) – The Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis

By 1843 Turner was in his late sixties and painting light almost as pure sensation. This near-square canvas swirls the morning after Noah's flood into a bright vortex, with the figure of Moses faint at its centre. The words in brackets in the title point to a book. A few years earlier Goethe's Theory of Colours had appeared in English, translated by the painter Charles Eastlake, and Goethe treated yellow as the first colour that light gives off. Turner floods the whole picture with that warm yellow to stand for hope and returning life. He made it as one of a pair. Its darker companion shows the flood itself, the evening before. Both came to the nation in 1856 as part of the vast bequest Turner left when he died.