page_title: After the Deluge (painting)
section_title: After completion
hierarchical_section_title: After the Deluge (painting) / After completion
context_page_description: After the Deluge, also known as The Forty-First Day, is a Symbolist oil painting by English artist George Frederic Watts, first exhibited as The Sun in an incomplete form in 1886 and completed in 1891. It shows a scene from the story of Noah's Flood, in which after 40 days of rain Noah opens the window of his Ark to see that the rain has stopped. Watts felt that modern society was in decline owing to a lack of moral values, and he often painted works on the topic of the Flood and its cleansing of the unworthy from the world. The painting takes the form of a stylised seascape, dominated by a bright sunburst breaking through clouds. Although this was a theme Watts had depicted previously in The Genius of Greek Poetry in 1878, After the Deluge took a radically different approach. With this painting he intended to evoke a monotheistic God in the act of creation, but avoid depicting the Creator directly.
  The unfinished painting was exhibited in Whitechapel in 1886, under the intentionally simplified title of The Sun. Watts worked on the painting for a further five years, and the completed version was exhibited for the first time at the New Gallery in 1891.
context_section_description: The completed version of After the Deluge was exhibited at the New Gallery in 1891. On the occasion of its 1891 exhibition and at a later exhibition in 1897, also at the New Gallery, it was accompanied by an explanatory note (thought to have been written by Watts) explaining the image:
  A transcendent power of light and heat bursts forth to re-create; darkness is chased away; the waters, obedient to the higher law, already disperse into vapoury mists and pass from the face of the earth.
  — Note accompanying After the Deluge on its exhibitions at the New Galleries.
  Between 1902 and 1906 it was exhibited around the country, being shown in Cork, Edinburgh, Manchester and Dublin, as well as at Watts's own gallery at Little Holland House. In 1904 it was transferred to the newly-opened Watts Gallery in Compton, Surrey, shortly before Watts's death later that year. Two years prior to this, Watts had returned to the theme of creation with The Sower of the Systems, which for the first time in one of his works directly depicted God, and which he described as representing "a great gesture into which everything that exists is woven".
  Although Watts painted landscapes throughout his life, he did not consider such paintings to be major works, and when between 1886 and 1902 he donated what he felt to be his 23 most significant non-portrait works to the nation for public display, no landscape paintings were included. As a consequence of its omission from these gifts to the nation, After the Deluge is not among his better-known works, although it was greatly admired by many of Watts's fellow artists. Walter Bayes wrote in 1907 that After the Deluge was "the sort of landscape that we connect with the name of Mr Watts, a landscape from which all that is coarse and material has been eliminated, and which offers a residuum that is a kind of sublimation of all the most poetic elements in nature". It has been cited as an influence on many works painted in the two decades following its completion, including paintings of the sun by Maurice Chabas, Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo and Edvard Munch. After the Deluge remains in the collection of the Watts Gallery.
caption: The Sun by Edvard Munch, 1911
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