This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
J.M.W. Turner exhibited Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory), the Morning after the Deluge, Moses Writing the Book of Genesis at the Royal Academy in 1843, paired with its companion Shade and Darkness, the Evening of the Deluge. The unwieldy title is itself a kind of citation. In the painting a luminous vortex of gold, white and yellow envelops a barely legible figure of Moses beside the brazen serpent he raised in the wilderness, built from exactly the warm, plus colors Goethe associated with vitality and hope, set against its companion picture's cool, minus darkness. Turner absorbed that emotional half of Goethe's argument, the association between warm tones and feelings of renewal, more readily than its technical apparatus, using it here to carry a biblical narrative of hope after catastrophe. Turner was not the only painter reading Goethe; Philipp Otto Runge, the Pre-Raphaelites, and later Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint all drew on the same book in different ways. But Turner is the artist whose engagement can be traced most directly from the annotated page to the finished canvas. Both paintings entered the Tate collection as part of the 1856 Turner Bequest, were stolen from a Frankfurt exhibition in 1994, and were recovered in 2000 and 2002, Nicholas Serota calling them, on their return, among Turner's most important works.