1861
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
The Storm is a 1861 by James McNeill Whistler, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see dark waves crashing over a small boat in the rain, two figures hunched inside. Whistler painted this in 1861 while stuck on a riverboat with friends during a downpour. The boat’s cover keeps the scene dim, making the water look almost black. It’s less about the storm itself and more about the quiet, cramped moment inside the boat. Look up *sfumato*—the soft, smoky way Whistler blurred the edges here.
During the summer of 1861, the artist Matthew White Ridley introduced Whistler to Edwin Edwards, a lawyer who had left his profession to devote himself to his avocations of art and music. Edwards used a covered boat for etching expeditions on the river---no doubt inspired by "le botin," the covered boat from which the Barbizon artist Charles Daubigny sketched the Seine (see The Boat in Conflans, elsewhere in the exhibition). In June 1861, despite persistent rain, Edwards invited Ridley and Whistler to take the boat on a camping trip to Maple Durham. On this voyage, Whistler made several…
Read the full account in the museum source.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American painter in oils and watercolor, and printmaker, active during the American Gilded Age and based primarily in the United Kingdom.
See the richer artist pageYour cart is empty
Explore artworks →
