J.M.W. Turner

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

When Charles Lock Eastlake, a Royal Academician and Turner's friend of nearly forty years, published the first English translation of Goethe's Zur Farbenlehre in 1840, complete with his own extensive notes for British artists, J.M.W. Turner acquired a copy and went through it with a pencil. What survives is not a record of simple agreement. Art historian John Gage, who studied the annotations directly and remains the principal authority on them, describes Turner responding with disdain and suspicious caution as often as approval, terse or amusing marginal notes rather than a student's careful underlining. Where Goethe described shadows cast by raised hands, Turner scrawled that if this were fact there would appear two men out of one. Where Goethe laid out his scheme of primary colors, Turner wrote simply, what, blue and yellow. Gage's own 2009 lecture on the annotations goes further, arguing that Turner, for all his engagement, was not fully attuned to the specific distinction Goethe drew between the higher and lower transformations of blue and yellow, and had, in fact, developed his own light and dark polarity independently before he ever read Eastlake's translation. When John Ruskin later asked Turner directly what his 1843 tribute painting Light and Colour meant, Turner's answer was characteristically evasive: red, blue, and yellow.

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.