The Deluge

In 1802 the war with France paused for a year, and Turner, 27 and newly made a full member of the Royal Academy, crossed the Channel with a crowd of other British visitors to see the Louvre. Its walls then held pictures the French armies had gathered from Italy and the Low Countries, among them Poussin's Winter, painted in the 1660s and showing the Flood. Turner sat in front of it and filled pages of a sketchbook with an argument about the picture, admiring its grandeur and objecting to its cold, pale light. His own Deluge answers that. The sun goes down red behind the rain and the water moves in long diagonal sweeps. He kept the canvas by him, sending it to the Academy only in 1813, and it came to the nation with the rest of his studio after his death in 1851.