Approaching Storm, White Mountains

This small picture portrays a family farm nestled in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. In the lower right, two figures and a dog gather on a hilltop. They watch calmly as an afternoon storm gathers above their cultivated fields. Based in Boston, Alvan Fisher was one of the first artists in the United States to specialize in landscape art. A portraitist by training, he began painting scenes of rural New England in the mid-1810s. These works celebrate the daily rhythms of agricultural life, which many at the time saw as the foundation of a strong and stable democracy.