Martin Johnson Heade's 'Thunder Storm on Narragansett Bay.' - 1868; Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Magazine Antiques, March, 1994 by Sarah Cash

(3)Letter from Heade, New York City, to Frederic Edwin Church (1826--1900), begun on April 27, 1868, continued on May 6, and completed on June 16 (Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.).

(4)John Wilmerding noted the relationship of Heade's thunderstorm pictures to the turmoil and uncertainty caused by the Civil War in "Under Chastened Light: The Landscape of Rhode Island," in The Eden of America: Rhode Island Landscapes, 1820--1920, ed. Robert G. Workman (Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, 1986), p. 14. J. Gray Sweeney related the iconography of Thunder Stom on Narragansett Bay to Thomas Cole's cycle The Voyage of Life, in "A 'very peculiar' Picture: Martin Johnson Heade's Thunderstorm over Narragansett Bay," Archives of American Art Journal, vol. 28, no. 4 (1988), pp. 2--14.

(5)Heade showed the painting in the 1860 annual exhibition at the National Academy of Design, as confirmed by "National Academy of Design: Fourth Gallery," in the Home Journal, May 5, 1860, p. 2. The unidentified writer described "the pale foreground, the black water, the dread feeling in the coming storm, and the homely and careless fisherman" as "simply rendered, and present[ing] an effect that is rare and true; the lightning only is faint and a failure."

(6)The first word in the penciled inscription at the top right of the drawing in Fig. 3, although very faded, appears to be short and to end in "y." Rocky Point is the only locale on the mainland with a short name that is visible from the spot on Prudence Island with the topographical features shown in the sketches and painting.

(7)Changes in the configuration of the marshes since 1859 preclude a positive identification of Heade's vantage point, but present-day views to the mainland suggest that it was Sheep Pen Cove or Long Point, which defines the cove on the east.

(8)Heade showed the painting in the 1867 annual exhibition at the National Academy of Design and most likely also in the 1868 annual exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

(9)These are Shore Scene, Point Judith of 1863 (in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and Point Judith, Rhode Island, a closely related nocturnal view probably painted shortly thereafter (in the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio).

(10)This was noted in an article entitled "The Art Association: Third Day of the Exhibition--More of the Pictures" in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 21, 1868.

(11)"National Academy of Design: Fourth Gallery," p. 2.

(12)"Art Among the People," in Eyes and Ears (Boston, 1864), p. 263.

(13)Since Sophocles's Antigone, storms and ships in distress have symbolized civil unrest. For a recent discussion of the tradition, see David C. Miller, "The Iconology of Wrecked or Stranded Boats in Mid- to Late Nineteenth-Century American Culture," American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, ed. David C. Miller (New Haven, Connecticut, 1993), pp. 186--187. See also Herman Melville's "Conflict of Convictions," in The Poetry of the American Civil War, ed. Lee Steinmetz (East Lansing, Michigan, 1960), pp. 57--60. In ANTIQUES, July 1988, p. 126, Franklin Kelly draws a parallel between shipwrecks depicted in the paintings of Fitz Hugh Lane (1804--1865) and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "The Fire of Driftwood" (1849--1850).