After the Deluge, also known as The Forty-First Day,[1] 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.

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.

However, it was greatly admired by many of Watts's fellow artists, and has been cited as an influence on numerous other painters who worked in the two decades following its initial exhibition.

[8] His portraits were highly regarded,[8] and in 1867 he was elected to the Royal Academy, at the time the highest honour available to an artist,[6][A] although he rapidly became disillusioned with its culture.

[17] Although his father's strict evangelical Christianity had instilled in Watts a strong dislike of organised religion, he had a deep knowledge of the Bible,[2] and Noah and the Flood were both themes he regularly depicted throughout his career.

[19] Hilary Underwood of the University of Surrey writes that Watts likely painted so many works on the theme of Noah as he saw modern parallels with the notion of the cleaning of a degenerate society while preserving those who still adhered to moral standards.

And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made.Watts illustrated the scene with a highly stylised seascape.

'Watts had previously depicted an orange sun above a flat sea in his 1878 work The Genius of Greek Poetry,[21][C] but the theme and composition of After the Deluge was radically different.

[21] After the Deluge was explicitly intended as a monotheistic image, evoking both the magnificence and the redemptive mercy of a single all-powerful God engaging in the act of creation.

[20] After the Deluge was exhibited in unfinished form in 1886 as The Sun at St Jude's Church, Whitechapel;[17][D] Samuel Barnett, vicar of St Jude's, organised annual art exhibitions in east London in an effort to bring beauty into the lives of the poor;[24] he had a close relationship with Watts, and regularly borrowed his works to display them to local residents.

[1] 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".