This dark seascape painted by Martin Johnson Heade in 1868 lives in an ornately carved, gold frame and is roughly 32 inches tall by 54 inches wide.

The artist places the viewer on a Rhode Island shoreline, looking at an extremely calm bay filled with several sailboats and land on the other side of the water. Dark, cloudy, ominous skies fill the top half of the canvas. A thin white, zigzagged lightning bolt cuts through the middle of the sky in the middle of the canvas, adding drama to the scene.

In the bottom foreground, there is a yellow sandy beach that has a cluster of beach grass on the left, wood pieces from a shipwreck in the middle of the beach, and lots of smaller rocks scattered across the entire beach. In the bottom center, three people appear. A shadowy figure messes with the sails of the boat behind the hull. A man on the left walks toward the right side of the painting down a sandbar away from a docked sailboat; he wears a hat, a red shirt, and light-colored pants. He rests an oar over one shoulder and holds a bucket by his side in his other hand. Ahead of him, farther right on the canvas, walks another man wearing a hat, a light-colored shirt, and red pants. He holds an oar in one hand down by his waist.

The beach extends into dark, very still water. Two boats with white sails float on the left, while the right side of the canvas has six boats with white sails, some closer to the viewer than others, and they face different directions. Above the water and land is the sky. The sky takes up about two thirds of the canvas. The boats on the left are under a gray, cloudy sky, while the boats on the right are caught in the middle of a downpour, indicated by the darker clouds over them, and vertical brush strokes imply rain. A lightning bolt separates the lighter sky on the left from the darker, stormy skies on the right. Four white birds and two black birds fly over the boats.

On the other side of the bay is a strip of land that is more visible on the left and starts to fade in the darkness of the storm as it reaches to the right side of the painting. The land is heavily wooded with broader strips of muted colors that represent buildings or houses. Above the land the sky fills up the rest of the canvas.

When this artist exhibited this painting, audiences did not know what to make of it because this stormy seascape was an uncommon theme for the artist and for landscapes and seascapes at the time.