The Tempest

This storm at sea is about ten centimetres tall and 12 wide, smaller than a paperback book, painted in nothing but black and white. Peder Balke laid in the sea and sky around 1862 with a few quick sweeps of the brush, and in places the paint is so thin that the white ground of the panel shines through as spray and broken cloud. Two sailing boats ride the swell, and the gulls above them are single touches of the brush, some dark, some light. In the foreground black rocks break the surf, the hazard any sailor on that coast would read at once. The weather he had in mind was real. In the diary of his journey up Norway's northern coast in 1832, Balke described standing on a cliff in hurricane-force wind. The panel was given to the National Gallery in 2010 by Danny and Gry Katz.