Approaching Storm by William Keith

William Keith · 1880

This is William Keith's "Approaching Storm," painted in 1880 and now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art's American Wing. In 1984, at the height of a booming market for 19th-century American landscape painting, a buyer paid $90,000 for it at auction, serious money for a serious painting by one of California's most celebrated Tonalist painters.

Look at how Keith builds the drama. The entire composition is a weather event. Dark, churning clouds mass on the left, while a luminous pale-gold break of sky on the right feels like the last window of calm. At the horizon, a thin silver-white band of light, Keith's signature device, squeezes between the storm and the dark earth, creating almost theatrical depth. Below it, a tiny farmworker and scattered cattle go about their business, completely indifferent to what is about to hit them.

Keith was a Scottish immigrant who became the defining landscape painter of the California Barbizon school. He trained in Europe and ran studios in Boston and New York, but the vast open spaces of the American West became his true subject. This painting sits right at the pivot: the scale of the land against that violent sky announces California, not Europe.

In 2015, the same painting resurfaced at auction. The market for American Tonalism had cooled dramatically. It sold for $5,100. A ninety-four percent decline, not because the painting changed, but because taste did. The storm in the sky turned out to be a quieter kind of forecast.

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Details

The engine of the painting , churning charcoal and indigo clouds convey imminent violence and dwarf every human element below

The last window of calm before the storm closes in; the tonal contrast with the left sky is what makes the painting dramatic

The vertical silhouette anchors the left edge and channels the eye upward into the storm; leaves already bending suggest wind has arrived

Keith's signature move , a sliver of silver-white light squeezed between storm and field, creating almost theatrical depth

Broad gestural brushwork here is closest to the viewer and most legible , Keith's handling reveals the Barbizon influence in his mark-making

Transcript

In 1984, a buyer paid ninety thousand dollars for this painting. The artist was one of the most famous landscape painters in California. Look at the sky. The storm is the real subject. That sliver of light at the horizon was Keith's signature move. Thirty years later, in 2015, it went to auction again. It sold for five thousand one hundred dollars. A ninety-four percent loss, while the storm just kept coming.