This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In 1840, the British painter and scholar Charles Lock Eastlake published an English translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1810 Theory of Colours, adding his own extensive notes for the benefit of British artists. One painter took the invitation further than any other. J.M.W. Turner acquired a copy, read it closely enough to annotate it throughout, and then went further still: he painted his engagement with it directly onto canvas. Goethe's theory rejected Newton's account of color as light mathematically decomposed by a prism, arguing instead that color arises from the interplay, the polarity, of light and darkness as a human eye actually perceives them. For a painter, this reframing had an obvious appeal that a physicist's account did not: it treated color as something inseparable from looking, from mood, from the emotional charge a scene carries, rather than as a fixed physical property waiting to be measured. Turner absorbed the emotional half of Goethe's argument in particular, the association Goethe drew between warm, plus colors and feelings of vitality and hope, and between cooler tones and their opposite. The clearest evidence is a single 1843 canvas, Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory), the Morning after the Deluge, Moses Writing the Book of Genesis, its unwieldy title itself a kind of citation. Turner built the painting around Goethe's account of how the eye resolves light filtered through moisture and atmosphere into gradations running from yellow through red, using exactly the warm, uplifting plus colors Goethe had described to carry a biblical narrative of renewal after catastrophe. Turner was not alone in 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, which is why his name, more than any other painter's, has become attached to the afterlife of a book Goethe wrote to settle an argument with a physicist and ended up settling something else entirely with a generation of painters instead.