The present work was in the possession of the artist on his death in 1864 and was sold at his estate sale in 1865. It depicts a bay surrounded by mountains partly obscured by a sheet of driving rain. Calame portrays the changeability of the weather with great subtlety. He uses broad, emphatic brushstrokes to model the contrast between the patches of bright sky and the sombre, leaden mass of the storm clouds. He captures the varied reflections of light as they fall on the pounding breakers in the foreground. The transparent layer of underpainting serves as a compositional device to characterize the transparency of the waves.

Anker ascribes the painting to the period 1858-60. This coincides with Calame’s final visits to the South of France, as the inscription on the verso suggests: coup de vent sur les Côtes Méditerranée [sic] en Provence. Anker also sees the marked fluidity of the brushwork as a further reason for this dating.

Elements of the present painting recall a number of Calame’s other late works. These frequently take as their subject one of the Swiss lakes. It is possible that the bay depicted in the present work is one of the Lake Geneva bays.

Calame began his career as an employee of a banker named Diodati. It was Diodati who enabled him to take up painting. He financed Calame’s studies from 1829 onwards under the landscape painter François Diday. Calame spent free moments colouring Swiss views which he sold to tourists.

He began to exhibit regularly in Geneva, Berlin and Leipzig in 1835 and from 1839 onwards was a regular contributor to the Paris Salon. This brought him considerable public recognition, particularly in France and Germany. Constantly searching for new motifs, he travelled widely in France, Germany and Holland. He visited Rome and Naples in 1844, where he first experienced the phenomenon of Italian light. His health began to fail in 1855 and this compelled him to restrict his travels to regions north of the Alps.

In the 1840s, Calame was ranked as one of Switzerland’s best landscape painters in the company of such names as François Diday, Charles-Louis Guigon and Wolfgang-Adam Töpffer.