Evening, Storm Clearing Off

John Linnell was one of the most successful and influential landscape painters active in Great Britain during the first half of the 19th century. Along with John Varley, he pioneered the regular practice of plein-air painting along the Thames and in the suburbs of London. The intensity and the poetic sublimity of this representation of naturalistic phenomena are typical of Linnell's most accomplished works. It is a view of nature that would resonate through the 19th century not only in the works of many British imitators but also in those of many American painters, in particular those affiliated with the British-born artist Thomas Cole, his protégé Frederic Church, and their circle of Transcendentalists.