Passing off of the Storm | Serene Seascape Print

In Passing Off of the Storm, painted during the final summer of his life, John Frederick Kensett offers a lesson in restraint, perception, and the poetic possibilities of stillness. This luminous panel, part of what is now referred to as the artist’s “Last Summer’s Work,” was inspired by the view from Contentment Island in Connecticut. True to its name, the painting breathes a quiet sense of peace after disturbance, delivering the viewer into a moment of clarity and suspension between sky and water.

Kensett’s composition is striking in its refusal to conform to traditional framing. With no trees, cliffs, or foreground elements to guide the eye inward, he instead uses the sheer expanse of open space to communicate a vision of nature stripped to its essence. The horizontal format stretches languidly across the viewer’s field of vision, like an exhalation. A glassy sea mirrors a sky beginning to lift, with soft clouds retreating and light returning.

At first, the canvas appears nearly abstract. Wide planes of pale blue and warm gray dominate the scene, but it is in the subtleties that Kensett’s brilliance reveals itself. A rowboat sits low in the foreground, casting a faint shadow on the glassy surface. Four diagonal reeds emerge with quiet precision from the water. A scatter of white sails punctuates the horizon, and a tiny island to the right offers a gentle interruption to the composition’s fluid serenity.

The emotional weight of the painting lies not in what is depicted, but in how it is felt. Kensett’s ability to capture the barely perceptible—light after rain, air clearing over water, the hush that follows tension—is profound. He paints not a storm, but its vanishing. Not motion, but its memory.

For the modern viewer or collector, Passing Off of the Storm serves as a preserved moment of stillness, a portrait of a landscape forever caught between past turbulence and present peace. It reminds us that the most powerful expressions can reside in silence, and that art’s deepest resonance often comes not through what it explains, but what it allows us to experience. Kensett, with nothing more than atmosphere and light, gives us that rarest of gifts: a true sense of calm.