
Public Domain
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Public Domain
Image downloads are for educational use only. For all other purposes, please see our Obtaining and Using Images page.

Public Domain
Image downloads are for educational use only. For all other purposes, please see our Obtaining and Using Images page.

Public Domain
Image downloads are for educational use only. For all other purposes, please see our Obtaining and Using Images page.




George Inness, Sr.
American, 1825-1894
The Coming Storm, 1878
oil on canvas
support: 26 x 38 1/2 inches (66.04 x 97.79 cm); framed: 37 x 50 x 4 inches (93.98 x 127 x 10.16 cm)
Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Albert H. Tracy Fund, 1900
1900:1
More Details
Inscriptions
Provenance
the artist;collection of Mrs. William G. Bryan;
gifted to her daughter, Mary B. Lewis;
sold to the Albright Art Gallery, between January 1 and 15, 1900
Class
Work Type
Information may change due to ongoing research.Glossary of Terms
The subject of this composition, the coming storm, was a popular one in nineteenth-century Romantic painting. George Inness created more than two-dozen works on the theme over a thirty-year period. In this instance, the billowing clouds and etheric light caused by the approaching squall further imbued transcendental meaning into this subject. Dissimilar to many of his contemporaries who chose to portray the untamed wilderness, Inness, like the French Barbizon painters, preferred a more intimate, domesticated, or in his words, “civilized” landscape. His theories and ideas were influenced by the philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg (Swedish, 1688–1772), whose writing he first encountered in the early 1850s. The Coming Storm presents a heroic vision in which the small human figure in the bottom-left foreground gives psychological as well as physical scale to the storm. Like Swedenborg, Inness came to believe that nature reflected the spiritual realm in which humans are a part of a harmonious whole, neither subordinate to it nor totally dominant.
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