Thomas Doughty (1793–1856)
Approaching Storm (Land Storm), 1822
Oil on canvas, 23 x 32 in.
Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Gift of the David and Laura Grey Collection, in memory of David Grey, TC.2025.3

“Before Thomas Cole, the Philadelphian Thomas Doughty was the most promising landscape painter in the young United States, and Philadelphia was the center of landscape painting. When the aspiring artist Cole lived in that city from later 1823 to early 1825, he visited the exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where, his earliest biographer reported, his “heart sunk” as he stood before Doughty’s pictures, feeling that he might never attain their level of skill and expression. Here, for example, Doughty anticipates Cole’s taste for the Sublime, or fearsome, in landscape, orchestrating windblown woodlands and rolling storm clouds to fashion a scene of impending threat and natural drama. After Cole moved to New York and traveled up the Hudson River to sketch the Highlands and the Catskill Mountains, the paintings he made brought an even bolder hand to scenes like this one, catapulting Cole past Doughty and eventually establishing New York as the center of what came to be called the Hudson River School.” —Kevin Avery, Ph.D.

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