This work is one of a proposed set of four monumental landscapes representing the Times of Day. Gericault completed only three: Morning: Landscape with Fishermen (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), Noon: Landscape with a Roman Tomb (Musée du Petit Palais, Paris), and the present canvas. Painted in Paris during summer 1818, the landscapes were conceived as decor, either to be exhibited at the Salon or to be placed in a specific interior. Nothing is known about a commission; nevertheless, extant receipts for the delivery of the canvases to Gericault's studio enable the works to be dated with precision.

The landscapes fuse souvenirs of ruins in the Italian countryside, which Gericault had visited in 1817, with the stormy skies and turbulent moods characteristic of the emerging aesthetic of Romanticism and the Anglo-French concept of the Sublime. Gericault painted these landscapes at a time of personal turmoil: his uncle's second wife was about to give birth to a child whom Gericault had fathered. This event interrupted his work on the Times of Day and explains why only three of the four landscapes were realized.

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