Drama on Canvas: Five Dramatic Scenes in Painting

Key facts

• Sanford Gifford's A Coming Storm (1863–1880) is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; its first owner was Edwin Booth, brother of John Wilkes Booth.
• Albert Bierstadt's Storm in the Mountains (ca. 1870) is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and depicts the Watzmann in the Berchtesgaden Alps, southern Bavaria, Germany.
• J. M. W. Turner's Fishermen at Sea (ca. 1796) is at Tate, London, and was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1796.
• Ivan Aivazovsky's Ship Amid the Stormy Sea (1887) is at the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
• James Hamilton's The Last Days of Pompeii (1864) is at the Brooklyn Museum, New York City.
• Joseph Wright of Derby's Vesuvius from Portici (ca. 1776) is at the Huntington Library, Pasadena; he traveled to Naples between 1773 and 1775 and made about 30 Vesuvius paintings.
• John Faed's Expulsion of Adam and Eve (1880s) is at the Cleveland Museum of Art; John Martin's Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still (ca. 1840) is at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven.
• Jean-Joseph Weerts's The Assassination of Marat (ca. 1880) is at Musée La Piscine, Roubaix; Peter Paul Rubens and Frans Snyders's The Head of Medusa (ca. 1617–1618) is at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.