After the Deluge

support height: 106 cm
support width: 179.5 cm
frame height: 137.5 cm
frame width: 211 cm
frame depth: 4.5 cm

In the Bible, the Book of Genesis tells of a terrible flood that wiped out all life on Earth, except for those who were saved in Noah’s ark. The torrential rains lasted 40 days and nights. Watts depicts the moment that the sun reappears with its warm, restorative rays reflecting across the waters. The painting evokes the atmospheric landscapes of English painter J M W Turner, who Watts exhibited alongside in London at the start of his career. Watts rejects the traditional symbols used to covey the biblical narrative, including the ark and dove. Instead, his focus on the spectacle of the rising sun recalls avant-garde European painting in the 1880s

The painter Sir George Clausen R. A. once perceptively remarked that, for Watts, ‘it was not enough to record things’ [1]. Watts’s series of more and more abstract pictures of the Noah’s Flood, The Dove that Returned in the Evening (COMWG2008.43, 1868-9), The Dove which Returned Not Again (COMWG2007.804, 1877), and After the Deluge, serve as illustrations of this practice. They were some of Watts’s best loved works. For example, Clausen argued that The Dove which Returned Not Again was ‘as fine’ a thing ‘as have been done’ [2]. G. F. Watts’s diluvian figure and landscape paintings in particular show his remarkable knowledge and understanding of ‘the great controlling things, the sun and the sky, in their relation to the earth and to people’ [3]. Furthermore, it showed his deep interest in Noah’s Deluge in Genesis 6-9, which originated in Mesopotamia in the Atrahasis Epic and The Epic of Gilgamesh, which was rediscovered and translated by the English Assyriologist George Smith in 1872 [4].

After the Deluge, which depicts the sun’s return after the forty days of rain described in Genesis is one of Watts’s most remarkable paintings. When it was exhibited for the first time at the New Gallery in 1891, the critic and art historian Claude Phillips noted how the ‘invention’ was such ‘as only the modern Blake could have given birth to’ [5]. The prominent Victorian critic and editor M. H. Spielmann memorably called it ‘that golden glory representing the sun bursting through the rain-laden atmosphere after the Flood’, which together with The Three Goddesses (COMWG.30, 1885), Off Corsica, and the iridescent Uldra (COMWGNC.21, 1884) was thought to represent ‘achievements of a remarkable kind and of unusual value; for few now aim at that beauty of prismatic colour to which Mr. Watts devotes so much time and happy effort, as Turner in some sort strove before him’ [6].

After the Deluge was the last painting of Watts’s diluvian trilogy which was similar in intent to the three paintings by J. M. W. Turner The Deluge (c.1805), Shade and Darkness – the Evening of the Deluge (1843), and Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – the Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (1843), and John Martin’s (1789-1854) The Eve of the Deluge (1840, RCT), The Deluge (1834, YCBA), and The Assuaging of the Waters (1840, FAMS) [7]. Moreover, it is also one of Watts’s more unusual compositions in that there is little to indicate that the painting represents a scene from Noah’s deluge, apart from its title. As M. H. Spielmann observed, who was a friend and correspondent of Watts’s, while Watts did dedicate most of his life to ethical and religious reflection in his paintings he avoided ‘the ordinary theological emblems and symbols; indeed not so much as a cross is to be seen in any of his pictures’ [8]. Similarly, After the Deluge did not draw on the familiar iconography of Noah’s flood, i.e. the dove, the raven, the ark, the animals, the rainbow, or Noah and his family.

Watts’s innovative floodscape After the Deluge can be seen as the culmination of a nineteenth-century artistic trend whereby artists sought to reimagine and represent the deluge in response to scientific and archaeological discoveries that unsettled the chronology and facts of the traditional biblical narrative. Furthermore, this trend built on the legacy of Michelangelo’s frescos in the Sistine Chapel (1508-1512) and Poussin’s The Deluge (1660-1664). [9] Through their interpretations of the deluge, they had begun to shift the focus from the surviving remnant inside the ark, to the suffering multitudes outside it and the antediluvian civilisation that preceded the deluge. This practice was continued in diluvian art and literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and stories about the antediluvian empire and the hyper-industrial civilisation that heralded the deluge resonated strongly with the Victorians.

After the Deluge was shown at the New Gallery in 1891 together with Watts’s Nixie, also known as The Nixie’s Foundling.  The paintings appeared alongside a remarkable moonscape Earth-rise from the Moon (1891) by Sir Philip Burne-Jones, son of Edward Burne-Jones, a biblical painting Moses and Aaron before Pharaoh and his Magicians by a Mrs. Hastings, and another floodscape with the title A Flood, by John Trivett Nettleship (1841-1902) [10].

Footnotes:

[1]    Sir George Clausen R. A., Aims and Ideal in Art; Eight Lecture delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy (London: Methuen, 1906), p. 48

[2]    Ibid., p. 51

[3]   Ibid., p. 51

[4]   See David Damrosch, ‘Epic Hero: How a Self-Taught British Genius Rediscovered the Mesopotamian Saga of Gilgamesh after 2,500 years’ in Smithsonian Magazine (May 2007).

[5]   Claude Phillips, ‘The Summer Exhibitions at Home and Abroad’ in Art Journal (Jun 1891), pp. 183-190, p. 189. Claude Phillips was the first keeper of the Wallace Collection.

[6]   M. H. Spielmann, ‘Mr G. F. Watts: His Art and His Mission’ in The Nineteenth Century 41.239, pp. 161-172, p. 164 On the significance of M. H. Spielmann in the Victorian art world see Julie F. Codell ‘Marion Harry Spielmann and the Role of the Press in the Professionalization of Artists’ in Victorian Periodicals Review 22.1 (1989), pp. 7-15. See The Three Goddesses, also known as Olympus on Ida (COMWG.30, 1885) and Uldra  (COMWGNC.21, 1884).

[7] See also Turner’s The Evening of the Deluge (c. 1843, NGA).

[8] M. H. Spielmann, p. 169.

[9]   See for example Norman Cohn, Noah’s Flood: The Genesis Story in Western Thought (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1996).

[10]  The latter depicted a lioness and her cub on a floating tree being attacked by two eagles. See G. M. ‘The New Gallery’ in The Speaker 3 (May 9, 1891), pp. 548-549, p. 549. See also Anon. ‘New Gallery’ in The Theatre 18 (Jul 1891), pp. 43-44, Anon. ‘Landscape at the Picture Galleries’ in Saturday Review 71.1857 (May 30, 1891), pp. 651-652. Sir Philip Burne-Jones painted a portrait of Watts at work on his statue Physical Energy. The portrait was exhibited in New York in 1902 at M. Knoedler & Co.

Text by Dr Eva-Charlotta Mebius