Gathering Storm on Long Island Sound

John Frederick Kensett

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The simplicity of line, form and arrangement that marks Kensett's late coastal landscapes lends to most of them an appealing repose. Here the mood shifts to subtle tension, in the dialogue between the spiny limbs of the vigilant pines and the enclosing sky. Kensett was a master in the expressive, if understated, use of trees. In this painting, their iconic, even anthropomorphic, qualities, silhouetted against the brooding firmament, evoke Rembrandt's etching, "The Three Trees," a classic of western landscape imagery that Kensett would have known well.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art