Après le déluge

George Frederic Watts started this in the mid-1880s and only signed it off around 1891, and for years he simply called it The Sun. He was in his seventies by then, a Victorian painter who had grown convinced that the England around him had lost its moral bearings, and he kept returning to the story of Noah's flood as a kind of cleansing. This is the moment after the 40 days of rain, when the ark's window opens and there is nothing to see but water and a sky torn open by light. Watts wanted to suggest God in the act of creation without ever painting a figure, so the whole canvas is given over to one enormous burst of sun breaking through cloud. Younger painters noticed. That radiant disc fed straight into the sun paintings of the next 20 years, including work by Edvard Munch.