Rainy Season in the Tropics

This breathtaking landscape captures the raw power and beauty of a tropical storm, complete with not just one but two magnificent rainbows arching across a misty mountain valley. Frederic Edwin Church, one of America's greatest landscape painters of the 19th century, traveled extensively through South America seeking dramatic natural scenes like this one. He was part of the Hudson River School, a movement of artists who believed that nature itself was a reflection of the divine, and painted it with almost religious devotion.

Church was fascinated by the scientific aspects of nature as much as its beauty. Notice how accurately he's rendered the double rainbow, with the colors reversed in the outer arc, and the way light breaks through storm clouds at different angles. The tiny figures resting beneath the palm trees in the lower right remind us just how small we are compared to these forces of nature. This painting invites us to simply stand in awe of a passing storm in the tropics, where rain, mist, mountains, and rainbows all come together in a single spectacular moment.