Coming Squall (Nahant Beach with a Summer Shower)
Thomas Doughty (American, 1793–1856)
1835
- Medium
- Oil on canvas mounted on cradled panel
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 52.1 × 71.4 cm (20 1/2 × 28 1/8 in.)
- Culture
- United States
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Arts of the Americas
- Credit line
- Purchased with funds provided by Mrs. Herbert A. Vance
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
As the first American artist to identify himself as a landscape painter, Thomas Doughty was instrumental in pushing the genre beyond mere topographical description to explore the larger idea of nature itself. Produced at the height of his career, this view of the sea at Nahant, Massachusetts, recalls 17th-century Dutch landscapes in the way that it captures changing atmospheric conditions and their effect on the surroundings without any hint of a narrative. Such paintings made Doughty one of the most popular landscapists in the United States in the 1820s and 1830s. In elevating nature as a worthy subject in its own right, Doughty, like fellow artist Thomas Cole, was particularly influential for the generation of landscape painters who came after him, namely the Hudson River School.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
