# Approaching Storm

- By: Edward Mitchell Bannister (born St. Andrews, New Brunswick, Canada 1828-died Providence, RI 1901)
- Date: 1886
- Medium: oil on canvas
- Classification: Paintings
- Dimensions: 40 1/8 x 60 in. (102.0 x 152.4 cm)
- Credit line: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of G. William Miller
- Museum: [Smithsonian Institution](https://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=935)
- Rights: [CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access)](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
- Picture: https://invisiblenetwork.ai/thumbs/web/ee4dd52dbfcb61764a314203d1c431ce.jpg
- Who can see it: Tweens profiles and older (museums give no ratings; placed by Invisible Network from the museum's own words)

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)