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Approaching Storm
Edward Mitchell Bannister (born St. Andrews, New Brunswick, Canada 1828-died Providence, RI 1901)
1886
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Classification
- Paintings
- Dimensions
- 40 1/8 x 60 in. (102.0 x 152.4 cm)
- Museum
- Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of G. William Miller
- Rights
- CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Smithsonian Institution
About this work
This windy scene of a lone figure struggling in the face of a storm would have held special meaning for nineteenth-century viewers, who believed that their nation's landscape was infused with God's presence. In 1886, the year he painted Approaching Storm, Edward Mitchell Bannister wrote an essay titled "The Artist and His Critics," in which he argued that spiritual expression is the artist's ultimate goal. (Hartigan, Sharing Traditions, 1985)
