Name/Title
Storm at Sea (an Overdoor)Entry/Object ID
2001.0003.0148Description
This artwork is featured in the exhibition, At Liberty: Life in the City of Brotherly Love During the Early Republic at the Arthur Ross Gallery (August 28 - December 13, 2026):
The imaginative architecture, scrawny cow, and contented fisherman of this pastoral scene, along with the rollicking seascape that hangs with it, represent some of the earliest efforts by a teenage Benjamin West. A Philadelphia tavern owner with whom the aspiring artist lodged gave them to Pennsylvania Hospital to curry favor with the hospital’s trustees, in case he should ever need their services. As an essential service provider for the city, the hospital was one of the few places where residents and visitors might see fine art in the decades prior to the opening of Charles Willson Peale’s Philadelphia Museum in 1784.
If you had been a patient at Pennsylvania Hospital in the eighteenth century, what might these works of art have meant to you as you struggled with illness or recovered from injury? How does art in spaces of healing today help patients and those who care for them?Type of Painting
EaselDimensions
Dimension Description
SizeHeight
12-1/2 inWidth
42-1/2 in