A storm let painters do what a calm day never allowed: tilt the horizon, black out the sky and decide who comes home. Behind these twelve canvases are a painter who swore he had been lashed to a mast in the storm he painted, and a picture cut from its frame more than thirty years ago that has never been seen again.
The storm is the subject. Take away any people and the picture still works.
It changed how painters handle weather or landscape.
It comes with a story on record: a theft, a shipwreck, a painter's claim to have been out in the storm.
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In most paintings the weather is a backdrop. In a storm painting it takes the lead: wind, rain and heavy water decide whether a ship holds, a raft is found or a crew gets home.
The danger was real. For centuries, sea trade carried the wealth of whole nations, and one bad night off a rocky coast could wipe out a fortune. A storm also let painters paint water as a solid mass and light as a single break in the cloud.
One rule decided the list: the storm had to be the reason the picture exists, whether it hits a ship, hangs over a city or gathers, unnoticed, behind two figures. Side by side, the twelve keep raising one question: was the painter actually there?
12. Ludolf Bakhuizen, Ships in Distress off a Rocky Coast (1667)
One of the three ships has already lost a mast. All three heel hard in the gale, and the wind is driving them toward a rocky shore. They are Dutch merchant ships, wide bellied cargo carriers flying the colors of the Dutch Republic, the vessels that moved the trade of the Dutch Golden Age. Ludolf Bakhuizen signed the canvas on a rock at the bottom and dated it 1667.
How did a painter get such waves right? Arnold Houbraken, Bakhuizen's first biographer, had an answer. Whenever heavy weather came up, he wrote, the painter had himself taken out by boat to watch the waves break against the coast.
The story flatters the painter, which is a reason to handle it with care. In painters' biographies of the period, work done straight from nature was a stock compliment, paid to many artists, and Houbraken's claim is hard to check.
What the canvas does show is a painter leaning toward relief more than disaster. At the top left, Bakhuizen opens a yellow gap in the clouds. Behind ships still fighting the gale, the sky has already started to clear.
At a Glance
Artist: Ludolf Bakhuizen (1630 to 1708)
Painted: 1667, signed and dated on the canvas
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 114.3 × 167.3 cm (45 × 66 in)
Where to see it: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
11. El Greco, View of Toledo (about 1599 to 1600)
View of Toledo shows a whole city under storm clouds, its hills a bright green. Toledo was where El Greco worked, and for most of his career he painted its saints, its martyrs and its churchmen. Around 1599 he turned to the city itself and put a storm over it. Yet the Toledo on his canvas is not quite the one its people walked through every day.