Focus on The World Before the Flood and explain the Composition.
The World Before the Flood is strongly influenced by A Bacchanalian Revel Before a Term of Pan (1632–1633) by Nicolas Poussin, whom Etty greatly admired and of whose works he had previously made several copies; this painting had been bought by the National Gallery in 1826. Adam and Michael are not visible in the painting. Instead, the viewer sees the scene from Adam's point of view.
Etty's painting is a Bacchanalian scene, centred on a group of six scantily-clad women dancing, while a group of men watch. The women's cheeks are flushed both with the exertion of their dancing and with their lustful attempts to seduce the watching men. The men "let their eyes rove without rein", each choosing the woman he wants to be with.At the left, five men eye the six dancing women. Three of the men discuss their choice of women, while the other two watch the dancing group alone. The male figure closest to the viewer, a seated black man, had previously appeared as a soldier in The Triumph of Cleopatra. A sixth man has made his choice, and lunges forward to grab the arms of a bare-breasted dancing woman.In the centre, the women dance. Their interlocked arms and hands create a pattern at the centre of the canvas, which acts as the focus of the painting. To the right of the central group of dancers a young man drags another woman away from the group of dancers, to join a pair of lovers who lie down together at the right of the painting.Across the entire width of the background, a darkening sky and oncoming storm clouds presage the destruction that the dancers are unwittingly about to bring upon themselves.In a preliminary study for The World Before the Flood now in the York Art Gallery, the broad structure is similar to that of the finished work, but the focus is more strongly on the central group of women. In Etty's oil sketch and in preliminary drawings the right-most of the dancing figures, wearing a green skirt, faces outward with her arms behind her back, forming a closed circle together with the central group of dancers. In the finished work, she gestures outwards from the circle, creating a clear narrative flow in the positions of the figures: from the single men on the left, to the man choosing a wife, to the group of dancing women, to the couple leaving the circle of dancers to join the reclining lovers on the far right.As was the case with most of his works, Etty did not give the painting a title. It was initially exhibited as A Composition, taken from the Eleventh Book of Milton's Paradise Lost, and was referred to by Etty himself as The Bevy of Fair Women and The Origin of Marriage. By 1862, when it was shown at the International Exhibition, it had acquired its present title.
Nicolas Poussin York A Bacchanalian Revel Before a Term of Pan Paradise Lost Bacchanalia Adam oil sketch International Exhibition left York Art Gallery A Bacchanalian Revel Before a Term The Triumph of Cleopatra