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Troyon was the third generation of his family to be employed at the Sèvres Manufactory decorating porcelains. In his spare time, he began to sketch in the Fontainebleau Forest, where he met other painters who would become associated with the Barbizon school. Troyon was a gifted marine painter and, in the early 1850s, acquired a house at Villers which he named The Academy of Landscape. He worked here closely with several young painters, including Eugène Boudin. After seeing the works of the Dutch 17th-century masters Paulus Potter and Albertus Cuyp during a tour of the Netherlands and Belgium in 1847, Troyon decided to specialize in animal genre subjects. In this view of an impending storm near the resort village of Villers-sur-Mer, the artist presents a cross section of society: a peasant couple riding on ponies equipped with baskets for carrying seaweed, a sportsman from town strolling with his gun, and hunters erecting fowling nets.