A Passing Storm

In 1849 Frederic Church was 23, and the National Academy of Design in New York made him a full member, a year after he had become its youngest associate. He was already taking pupils of his own. This small upright canvas, about 36 by 30 centimetres, dates from that year. A thunderstorm is moving away. Rain still hangs in grey streaks over the valley, while the top of the cloud has turned bright white against blue sky. On the left the light picks out a farmhouse on a rise, and on the right a shelf of rock juts out above the trees and the water. The museum's record names its first owner, R. Armstrong of Rochester in upstate New York, in 1849 itself. After that the picture drops out of sight for almost a century and turns up at a sale in Detroit in 1947.