Homer Dodge Martin began his career painting precisely rendered landscapes. Then—under the influence of French Barbizon artists such as Rousseau and Corot—changed his style to create more atmospheric pictures. As time went on, Martin's paintings became more like dreamlike landscapes of the mind than portraits of a specific place. Storm King, however, belongs to the earlier phase of his career. The canvas depicts one of the Hudson River's most famous mountains, located just north of West Point. We see the scene in full sunlight, likely at the end of summer, as the leaves are starting to change color. The composition, with a tree trunk angled slightly forward toward the center of the canvas, opening out to the distant view of the mountain, follows a standard arrangement used by many American landscape painters of the era.