Approaching Thunder Storm 1859 Poster

Approaching Thunder Storm 1859 by Martin Johnson Heade is a painting that was based on a sketch of an approaching storm that Heade witnessed on Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay about 1858. The image became the basis for a more elaborate and synthetic version of the subject painted in 1868 (Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas). Heade became a good friend of the acclaimed landscape painter Frederic Church (1826–1900), but he worked on the periphery of the Hudson River School. He specialized not in dramatic wilderness subjects, as many of the school did, but preferred more prosaic marshlands and coastal settings. Even when he painted storms, as here, he portrayed not the actual tempest, but its tense preamble of blackening sky and eerily illumined terrain. Although this artwork is digitally restored, the cracks and the fine lines are left intact on this painting to honor the time this painting emerged from.