Alexandre Calame studied with François Diday for three years but quickly became an independent artist in demand across Europe. It was Orage à la Handeck (Musée d’art et d’histoire, Genève), a larger work very similar in composition to the present picture, which won a gold medal at the Salon in Paris for the artist in 1839 and established his name as the champion of a national Swiss school of painting specializing in dramatic and romantic views of the alps. With the dramatically lit sky, the rushing waters of the mountain torrent and the pine trees bent by the force of the storm, Calame portrays an all-powerful and unhospitable nature in which man is absent.