The Evening of the Deluge

Apocalyptic in theme and deliberately unruly in handling, this is the darker half of the great Flood pair with which Joseph Mallord William Turner brought his career to a close. It and its companion, Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory): The Morning after the Deluge, were both shown at the Royal Academy in 1843, each carrying lines from Byron’s poem Heaven and Earth that Turner adopted as his catalogue epigraph for the biblical Deluge. The two paintings mark the culminating phase of his art, dissolving the object world into radiant and menacing color decades ahead of the abstractions of the twentieth century. The canvas entered the National Gallery of Art in 1960.