Although he achieved success with his ship portraits, Birch’s distinctive contribution to American art was his more romantic renderings of ships in storms, such as Loss of the Schooner "John S. Spence" . . . . In his cool palette, evocative sky, and turbulent sea Birch reveals the influence of Joseph Vernet (1714-1789), a French marine painter whose imaginative works were available to the artist in Philadelphia. Although Birch was actually depicting the aftermath of the storm, he still conveyed its power through the vigorous waves, overcast sky, brisk wind, and the narrative element of the destroyed ship. Although some of Birch’s stormy marines were fictional, at least two, the museum’s painting and The Loss of the New York Packet Ship "Albion," exhibited 1824 (unlocated), were based on actual events. The schooner "John S. Spence" was lost at sea not long after it had left the port of Norfolk, Virginia, bound for Havana, Cuba. The museum’s painting was commissioned by Alexander M. Peltz, one of the passengers on the schooner during its last voyage. At the age of nineteen Peltz, desirous adventure, left his home in Washington, D.C., and on August 19, 1827, set sail from Norfolk, Virginia, on the "Spence" in the company of a childhood friend, intending to travel to Mexico to join the company of the former US commodore David Porter. Six days later the schooner was wrecked in a storm on the open sea, its bowsprit and taffrail broken, and its masts transformed into a confusion of ropes and broken wood. Five survivors, including Pelz-but not his friend-were rescued a week after the wreck by a New England captain, Isaac Staples of the brig "Cobosse Contee," but only three lived to reach New York. Peltz originally intended to give the painting to Captain Staples, his rescuer. Staples was lost at sea before the painting was completed, however, so it remained in Peltz’s family until 1982. Shortly before his death Peltz wrote an account of the voyage, disaster, and struggle to survive without food and water. Birch no doubt based much of his rendering on Peltz’s oral account, for the written account demonstrates that he vividly recalled the details of the disaster. When the painting was exhibited in 1834 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts it was listed as a "second view." Birch used the incident as the basis for an engraving that appeared in the 1836 volume of The Token; however, this drawn The Wreck at Sea is a close-up view from on board the "Spence" rather than from the distant perspective, and it depicts only four men being rescued.

The art of the early Federal period did not greatly differ from that of the late colonial era. Portraits dominated the small field of painting. Victories on land and at sea in the War of 1812 brought the fledgling democracy greater confidence and new national pride. By 1829, when Andrew Jackson assumed the presidency, the foundations for an independent culture were securely laid. The philosopher-poet Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed the mood of the country in 1837: “our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.” The following decades would bring a swell of artistic creativity, focused on native themes that extolled the seemingly limitless bounty of the New World.
Portraiture, and to a lesser extent history painting, continued to occupy American artists, but increasing numbers turned to views of the local countryside and its inhabitants. Although the industrial revolution only began in the United States after the War of 1812, the following three decades witnessed economic changes, especially in the north, that significantly affected working conditions, family structure, and even religion. Paintings illustrated American virtues like ingenuity and industry as well as the pleasures of country life. The new taste for genre pictures—scenes of ordinary people involved in everyday activities—seemed ideally suited to the egalitarian attitude of the Jacksonian era.
This period also saw the rise of the country’s first truly national school of landscape painting, ultimately known as the Hudson River school. Its earliest, best-known exponent, Thomas Cole, sometimes painted romantic literary subjects in European settings, but his dramatic depictions of the American wilderness helped spur the popularity of American views. As the country developed, paintings of uninhabited wilderness were replaced by views of farms, towns, and factories, but American artists retained their sense of awe about the land.

Thomas Birch was one of the earliest and foremost marine painters in the United States. His finest paintings depicted dramatic storm-tossed seas and shipwreck scenes, such as this one. Although many of his seascapes were imaginary, the schooner John S. Spence did encounter turbulent weather and was lost at sea soon after departing Norfolk, Virginia, on its way to Havana. Alexander M. Peltz, only one of five passengers to be rescued, commissioned the painting as a gift to the New England sea captain who had saved him. This frame is thought to be the original. Stylistically it reflects a change from the simplicity of earlier Federal frames to a new taste for ornamentation, as plant motifs became elaborate decorative components. This emphasis on curving natural forms arose from the growing popularity of the Hudson River school aesthetic.