Andreas Schelfhout was one of the most successful painters of Dutch Romanticism, and owed much of his fame to his winter scenes. In the early 19th century, when beach scenes and winter landscapes had largely fallen out of favour among Dutch painters, Schelfhout helped revive both genres. He drew inspiration from the great masters of the Dutch Golden Age, particularly Meindert Hobbema and Jacob van Ruisdael, but also from contemporary artists such as Eugène Isabey, especially in his beach scenes, and John Constable. The latter’s influence can be sensed in the treatment of the clouds that animate the expansive sky of the present work.

By the 1840s, when this painting was created, Schelfhout had reached the height of his artistic powers. He had received remarkably little formal training – a fact in which he took some pride – and his art had developed dramatically since his beginnings in the early 1810s. His handling of light, mastery of composition and, above all, his magnificent skies led contemporary critics to call him the ‘Dutch Claude Lorrain’.

His winter scenes, tellingly, appeared only rarely in public exhibitions: many were already spoken for by wealthy and royal patrons, among them King William I of Württemberg and Tsar Alexander II of Russia.