Gathering Storm on Long Island Sound

Painted in 1872 and held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this is perhaps the most dramatic of Kensett's Darien paintings from his final year, depicting Long Island Sound under the gathering cloud and shifting light of an approaching storm. The storm subject was a staple of American landscape painting from Cole and Church onward, but Kensett gives it the restraint and formal purity of his Luminist approach: the 'gathering storm' is not dramatically theatrical but atmospherically observed, its drama lying in the quality of light rather than the violence of weather.

Kensett captures the distinctive quality of pre-storm light—the way colors intensify under a darkening sky, water becoming almost phosphorescent against the gathering clouds. His paint handling is more energized than in his calm-weather Luminist works, with the cloud formations built through more varied and animated strokes that contrast with the water's still, reflective surface.