Born in Avignon, Vernet went to Rome at the age of twenty to become a history painter. He soon took to landscape painting afte⛄r discovering the art of Claude Gellée, Salvator Rosa and Andrea Locatelli and decided to join the Studio of Adrien Manglard, a succesful French marine painter. He travelled to Naples in 1737 and on many other occasions. By 1740, Vernet had established a reputation as a painter of seascapes and the French diplomats as well as the English Grand Tourists were to be among Vernet's most consistent patrons.

In 1746, Vernet gained further recognition in France as he was accepted at the Academie Royale in Paris which enabled him to exhibit at the Salon from then on. But it is not before 1753 that Vernet was summoned back to France, on the initiative of the Marquis de Marigny, for what was to be one of Louis  XV's most important Royal commisions: Les ports de France series.

The present painting is a work of Vernet's maturity, dated to 1771, in which he skillfully combines the three types of Landscape paintings defined by Claude-Henri Watelet, “La nature copiée, la nature arrangée et les representation idéales de la nature champêtre” [nature copied, nature composed and the ideal r𝓀epresentation of the natural countryside].