Approaching Thunder Storm

The painting’s story and details

A man and dog sit beside Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. Water darkens ahead of them, with a thin flash of lightning in the distance. Heade painted this in 1859 from observations of a storm seen from Prudence Island around a year earlier. Bad weather is close, but the shore remains illuminated.

The man sits on boards facing the bay. Light picks out his hat, waistcoat and red sleeve. The dog sits beside him near the water. They remain ashore while boats are farther from land; the people’s different situations make the approaching storm a practical danger.

A small rowing boat appears on the dark water to the left. Its occupant’s light clothing makes it visible. Farther away is a white sail. These bright patches establish human presence where much of the bay has merged into a dark band.

The cloud stretches almost from one edge of the painting to the other. Its underside is uneven, while most of its surface remains uniformly dark. A thin broken line of lightning appears beneath it on the left.

Grass still catches light along the farther headlands. Narrow green and sandy strips separate dark water from dark sky. The light source itself lies outside the image. The remaining illuminated areas show that shadow is covering the bay gradually.

Stones, fabric, boards and equipment lie along the near shore. Their edges are much clearer than objects in the distance. The water has not yet developed high waves. Tension comes from the difference between the bay’s relatively calm surface and the weather already visible above it.

Heade began as a portraitist and moved frequently. Around the time of this painting, he settled in New York and became close to the landscape painter Frederic Church. Light remained central to his work on seashores, marshes and later among tropical flowers and birds. The term luminism for this attention to illumination was applied after his era.