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Coming Squall (Nahant Beach with a Summer Shower)

Thomas Doughty

1835

oil

canvas

From the collection of Art Institute of Chicago

American Impressionism Romanticism Early 19th Century Landscape

Dominant colour

About this work

You see a dark storm rolling over a quiet beach at Nahant, Massachusetts. The sky is thick with clouds, and the ocean churns under the wind. A few tiny figures stand near the water, barely noticeable. Doughty painted this in 1835, when most American artists just copied European styles. Instead, he focused on how light and weather change a place—no story, just nature doing its thing. It feels like you’re standing there, waiting for the rain. If you like this, look up *chiaroscuro*—how artists use light and shadow to make scenes feel alive.

The story of this work

Overview

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…

Provenance

Vode Galleries, Boston, by 1940; sold to Mrs. Sanders, Maine; by descent to her nephew, Hugo Ambrosi, Takoma Park, MD; by descent to his wife, Mary Ambrosi, Takoma Park, MD, c. 1970; by descent to her nephew, Robert C. Loman, Bethesda, MD, 2000-05; with Menconi & Schoelkopf Fine Art, New York, 2005; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, 2005.