Scene from the Great Flood

Joseph-Désiré Court's Scene from the Great Flood (1827) depicts a dramatic episode from the biblical Deluge — families and individuals clinging to the last remnants of high ground as the waters rise around them, a subject that combined the appeal of the natural sublime with the moral gravity of divine judgment. Court was a student of Gros and later Girodet, and this large-format Salon canvas shows him engaging with the catastrophist imagery that was one of Romanticism's most popular modes. The subject also carried geological resonance: in the 1820s, debates about the biblical flood and geological catastrophism were intensely topical. The work is at the Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon.

Court adopts the dramatic compositional strategies of his teachers — figures pressed against the foreground, gestures extreme and rhetorical, the sky turbulent with divine violence. The palette shifts from the warm flesh tones and drapery of the survivors to the dark, churning waters below and the stormy sky above, using the full tonal range available to the period's history painting.