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Approaching Thunder Storm

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Sketch for

Sketch for "Approaching Thunder Storm"

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Approaching Thunder Storm

Martin Johnson Heade  (1819–1904)

Date:
1859
Medium:
Oil on canvas
Dimensions:
28 x 44in. (71.1 x 111.8cm) Framed: 42 1/2 × 58 3/8 × 5 in. (108 × 148.3 × 12.7 cm)
Classification:
Paintings
Credit Line:
Gift of Erving Wolf Foundation and Mr. and Mrs. Erving Wolf, in memory of Diane R. Wolf, 1975
Accession Number:
1975.160

This artwork is not on display

  • Description

    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. This painting 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).

  • Signatures, Inscriptions, and Markings

    Signature: [at lower left]: M. J. Heade / 1859

  • Provenance

    William H. Chapman, New York, and East Orange, New Jersey, until died 1891; his wife, Helen Chapman, Oakland, Florida, and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1891–1905; his son, Niles Chapman, Indianapolis, 1905–44; descended in the family of Helen W. Fleischer, 1944–69; Thomas Fleischer, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1969–73; his son, David N. Fleischer, Bethlehem 1973–75; the Erving Wolf Foundation and Mr. and Mrs. Erving Wolf, New York, 1975 (Mr. and Mrs. Wolf retained one-third interest until 1977)

  • See also
    Who
    What
    Where
    When
    In the Museum
    Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
    MetPublications
20011406

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