After the Deluge

George Frederic Watts was Victorian Britain's most ambitious allegorical painter, committed to using paint in the service of moral and philosophical statement — what he called 'The House of Life' project. After the Deluge (1886), at the Watts Gallery in Compton, depicts the aftermath of the biblical flood — the world cleansed, renewed, and terrible. Watts brought to such subjects both genuine religious feeling and the grand compositional ambitions of the Old Masters he venerated. The Watts Gallery, dedicated to his work, holds his most significant paintings in the Surrey landscape he loved.

Watts's allegorical vision is rendered through his characteristic combination of Old Master tonality and romantic grandeur — warm, luminous color evoking divine light, compositional sweep suggesting cosmic scale. His paint handling is more loaded and physical than the academic smoothness of his contemporaries, giving the allegory material weight. The palette combines deep atmospheric tones with areas of intense warm luminosity.