Spirit of the Storm, c.1912
Oil on canvas, 36 x 48 3/4"
Museum Purchase with funds provided by Barbara B. Millhouse, 1980.2.6

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, landscape painting in America took on a new role.  Rather than taking center stage, as it had with the Hudson River School painters, the land often became the backdrop for a mystical or otherworldly scene, imbued with symbolism.  Such is the case with Elliott Daingerfield's The Spirit of the Storm.  Here, the nymph-like figure in the foreground summons the storm by dramatically raising her arm.  The resulting gust of wind whips her hair off of her shoulder in a graceful arc that parallels her gesture.

In investing his landscape with such spiritual significance, Daingerfield was almost certainly influenced by his friend George Inness, whose work The Storm is also in the collection.  A Swedenborgian, Inness believed in the presence of a spiritual world just below the natural world.  In Daingerfield's painting, one can almost sense the world of the spirit emerging.