Thunder Storm on Narragansett Bay
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Storm clouds darken the sky over Narragansett Bay as a bolt of lightning strikes in the distance and curtains of rain sweep across the far shore. White-sailed boats are scattered across the dark water, some heading in. In the foreground, a sailor furls his sail while two figures wade calmly through the shallows, and a beached sailboat rests on the sandy spit at the right. Despite the scale of the storm, nobody is rushing. Heade completed at least eight storm paintings between 1859 and 1868, returning again and again to the Rhode Island coast under threatening skies. The paintings coincided with the Civil War and early Reconstruction, and the imagery of darkening skies, lightning, and ships returning to shore carried obvious metaphorical weight, though Heade never made the connection explicit.