Claude-Joseph Vernet made his reputation with Mediterranean port scenes, and mountain landscapes such as this are rare in his oeuvre. This one was intended to serve as the companion to an equally grand port scene, now in a private collection. Both paintings were originally commissioned by the British collector Lord Shelburne, later the Marquess of Lansdowne. The artist recorded the specifics of the Lansdowne commission in his account book in 1774, noting that the patron wished for the first painting to show "a rustic country with rocks, high mountains, rushing streams, waterfalls, tree trunks." Vernet's works were highly prized and had a profound influence on the Romantic school of landscape painting in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Excerpt from

Bonnie Pitman, ed., "A Mountain Landscape with an Approaching Storm," in Dallas Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 167.

• Dallas Museum of Art
  Check out this press release about reuniting two Vernet landscapes for the first time in over 200 years.

• National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
  Read a biography of Claude-Joseph Vernet from the NGA.

• Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
  Learn more about Romanticism from the Met.