A Coming Storm and the Weight of the Sky
Sanford Robinson Gifford did not paint a simple weather pattern. He painted the end of the world. The year was 1863. The United States was tearing itself apart in the Civil War and the death toll was unimaginable. Gifford took all that blood and anxiety and projected it onto a piece of canvas measuring twenty eight by forty two inches.
A Coming Storm debuted at the National Academy of Design in New York to an audience desperate for a simple scenic landscape. What they got instead was a brutal mirror. The dark approaching clouds hang over the lake like a death sentence. They serve as a heavy visual metaphor for a nation actively collapsing. People were dying by the thousands and Gifford wanted everyone to feel the weight of the sky pressing down on them.
He uses dramatic atmospheric lighting to show just how fragile human existence really is against the overwhelming forces of nature and history. The glowing yellow light striking the mountains is the absolute pinnacle of American Luminism. It is a quiet desperate kind of light that makes the creeping darkness feel even heavier.
This specific brand of tension spoke to people who knew tragedy intimately. Edwin Booth bought the piece and hung it in his home. He was an acclaimed actor who understood a thing or two about impending doom long before his brother pulled a fatal trigger in a theater. Booth found deep solace in the moody atmosphere of the painting. He looked at the canvas and saw his own shattered world reflected back at him.
References
Avery, Kevin J. American Paradise The World of the Hudson River School. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987.
Harvey, Eleanor Jones. The Civil War and American Art. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2012.
Kelly, Franklin. American Landscape Painting and the Civil War. Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1999.