As the first American artist to identify himself as a landscape painter, Thomas Doughty was instrumental in pushing the genre beyond mere topographical description to explore the larger idea of nature itself. Produced at the height of his career, this view of the sea at Nahant, Massachusetts, recalls 17th-century Dutch landscapes in the way that it captures changing atmospheric conditions and their effect on the surroundings without any hint of a narrative. Such paintings made Doughty one of the most popular landscapists in the United States in the 1820s and 1830s. In elevating nature as a worthy subject in its own right, Doughty, like fellow artist Thomas Cole, was particularly influential for the generation of landscape painters who came after him, namely the Hudson River School.