그림자와 어둠

Turner made this in 1843 as one half of a pair, testing an idea he had been reading about in Goethe's theory that colours divide into warm and cold, positive and negative. This canvas takes the cold, shadowed side and gives it a subject to match, the eve of Noah's flood, with animals trudging toward the Ark as the sky darkens into one of Turner's late swirling vortices. Its companion piece shows the bright morning after the deluge. Turner owned the English translation of Goethe's book and had marked it up in the margins. He exhibited both paintings at the Royal Academy in 1843, when he was in his late 60s and painting almost nothing but light and weather.