In 1911 Bellows began to summer in Maine. During his visits there, until 1916, he moved increasingly away from the almost exclusively urban subject matter of his early career and turned toward landscape painting. The Coming Storm was painted during June 1916, when Bellows and his family were summering in remote Camden, Maine, with LEON KROLL. Early in their stay they were visited almost daily with storms, and Bellows’s paintings from June and July are among his most dramatic in their contrast and energetic brushwork. By this time he was systematically using the Maratta palette, and The Coming Storm is fairly strong in color despite its overcast tonality. In his record book the artist indicated the color scheme for his painting as follows:
Yellow-Green 13.9.5.3.1, Yellow 11-7, Green 11,
Green-Blue 9.1, Blue-Purple 9,
Orange-Yellow 1, Red-Purple 5, Red-Orange 5
[colors indicated by initials in original]
The numbers by each of the abbreviations of color names refer to the value of the hue that Bellows used. This system of assigning numbers to color values was established at a meeting in 1915 at which Bellows, Maratta, and others were present and which resulted in a chart of colors and values. It was one of several elaborations of the Maratta color system worked out in Henri’s circle.
