Thunder Storm on Narragansett Bay

Heade was primarily a self-taught painter. Although he settled in New York in 1859 and befriended the popular landscape painters of the day, his work, such as this dark and threatening painting of the Rhode Island coast, shows that he was an artist of uncommon vision who did not follow the mainstream. Although terrifying and enigmatic with its black sky and sea juxtaposed with disquieting calm, the scene is beautiful in its color pattern. Nineteenth-century viewers, having come to admire Heade’s brilliant, light-filled studies of marshlands and the seacoast, simply did not know what to make of this darker work.