Approaching Storm: Beach near Newport

Heade's title puts this beach near Newport, but the museum identifies the headland as Point Judith, at the southern tip of mainland Rhode Island, across the water from Newport. He came back to thunderstorms over that coast about half a dozen times in the early 1860s, and the museum counts this version the most severe of them. The sky and sea are nearly black, the beach is empty, the point of land glows with an eerie light, and three sailboats are still out on the water. A small patch of blue opens at the upper right. At the lower left he signed it with the year, but only the first three digits, 186, can be read. The painting's recorded history begins only in 1925, with a Boston owner. Then, in the early 1940s, as collectors began paying attention to Heade again, it passed through some six dealers and owners in Boston and New York in five years. In 1945 Maxim Karolik, a Russian-born singer who was assembling American paintings from 1815 to 1865 for the Museum of Fine Arts, bought it from the Macbeth Gallery in New York and gave it to the museum the same year.