Martin Johnson Heade made over one hundred paintings of salt marshes, whose flat expanses provided a canvas for the play of weather and tides. In Sudden Shower, Newbury Marshes, Heade's mastery of perspective allows the small canvas to convey a sense of the broad, flat landscape of the Massachusetts coast. In contrast to the regularly spaced haystacks, the looming clouds and veils of rain in this painting suggest impending change. Americans transformed agriculture by introducing the first effective harvesting machinery in the 1840s, yet Heade depicts the gathering of salt hay for animal feed, a traditional process resistant to mechanization and necessitated by the encroachment of New England's cities upon its pastures. Built on stilts, the haystack in the foreground suggests the fragility of the region's rural economy.