Building of the Ark also known as Noah Building the Ark

Painting height: 94 cm
Painting width: 73.7 cm
Frame height: 123 cm
Frame width: 103 cm

A group of six people are shown busy with the construction of the ark. Noah is at the centre of the composition carrying two planks of wood as starts building the ark to save his family and two of every animal as portrayed in Genesis 6-9. Two women carrying baskets can be seen to the right as they leave the scene. Noah’s Flood in the Book of Genesis was the Old Testament story that Watts most frequently returned to for inspiration in his work. The first two paintings by Watts that sought to illustrate the events of the deluge that covered the earth for forty days was Noah Building the Ark and The Preaching of Noah (c. 1862-63).

Both paintings were the result of a commission by the Dalziel brothers, George, Edward, and John of illustrations intended for their new illustrated Bible, although the project did not materialise as the Dalziel brothers had hoped. Their Dalziel’s Bible Gallery, which included sixty-nine illustrations done by several of the most prominent artists of the time, was not published until 1880. By then, however, it was met with great ‘artistic interest’ [1]. The ‘archaeological knowledge’ of the artists was noted as particularly unique to the edition [2]. Archaeological and geological discoveries in the nineteenth century had shed new light on the Noachian Deluge and Biblical civilisation. For example, George Smith of the British Museum had discovered The Epic of Gilgamesh in 1872. In The Times, Watts’s contribution to the volume was singled out as the most successful.

Noah Building the Ark remains an original composition. While it is more common to see Noah in a long robe directing the construction of the ark, in Watts’s painting Noah performs an almost supernatural feat of strength as he carries two heavy planks of gopher wood that cuts a diagonal through the composition. Beside him, three men are hard at work. To his left, two women carrying baskets are also participating in making the ark ready. One of them looks over her shoulder, straight at us. To their left, we see a dark threatening landscape, reminiscent of towering waves, foreshadowing the destructive flood. As we can tell from Noah’s windswept appearance, a storm is coming. As Mary Watts wrote, Watts ‘knew the Bible well, and remembered every detail of the Old Testament stories, and, as he retold these, just by an accent here and there he would throw new and original comment upon them, quite his own’ [3].

The painting was selected by Charles Aitken (1869-1936), the director of the Whitechapel Gallery, to appear in the very first exhibition at the newly founded Gallery in 1901 [4]. The critic of the Athenaeum was struck by the originality of Watts’s painting. He or she wrote that in Noah Building the Ark ‘Mr. Watts has got outside of all fashions and periods, and belongs entirely to himself. It is one of his best works…’ [5]. The painting was important to Watts and he kept it in his studio at Limnerslease. A photograph shows the painter seated and Noah Building the Ark on an easel on his left-hand side.

Footnotes:

[1]    Anon. ‘Dalziel’s Bible Gallery’ in The Art Journal (Dec 1880), pp. 365-366, p. 365.

[2]    Ibid. p. 365.

[3]   Mary Watts, George Frederic Watts: The Annals of an Artist’s Life Vol. I (London: MacMillan and Co., 1912), p. 17.

[4]   Mr Aitken went on to become the third Keeper of the Tate Gallery (1911-1917).

[5]   Anon. ‘The Whitechapel Art Gallery’ in The Athenaeum 3832 (Apr 6, 1901), pp. 440-440, p. 440.

Text by Dr Eva-Charlotta Mebius