Approaching Thunder Storm

Heade painted this in 1859, two years before the country broke into civil war, and viewers have long felt the coming dread in it. The sky has gone almost black while the bay below stays glassy and lit, an eerie stillness just before a storm. A lone man sits on the shore with his little boat and a dog, watching the weather come on. Off to the left a thin red thread of lightning cuts the dark. Painters of this American style chased exactly this kind of charged, silent light. It was the largest picture Heade had made up to then, worked up from a small sketch he took on Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island.