Andreas Achenbach (1815-1910) entered the fine art academy of St Petersburg in 1832, studying under Schadow and Schirmer. He developed his personal artistic vision through the close study of nature, which was nurtured after a trip he made with his father to Holland, the Baltic and North Sea coasts. After studying in Düsseldorf he went to Munich and then to Frankfurt, where he painted Storm on the Coast of Norway which, together with Shipwreck in the Hardanger Fjord, won him considerable acclaim. He produced many paintings as he travelled widely in northern Europe and Scandinavia. In 1873 he went to Italy and spent two years in the south and on Capri where he executed many watercolours. Inspired by the seventeenth-century Dutch masters, Achenbach specialised in painting the North Sea coasts, especially river estuaries. His tuition had a signifcant effect on the artistic development of his brother Oswald (see RCIN 403845, 403846), and of the landscape painter Albert Flamm. He was a key figure in the development of the modern German school of landscape, liberating its exponents from formal Classicism, in favour of the study of nature.

This sombre dramatic landscape is reminiscent of the work of Jacob van Ruisdael (1629-82). Several wooden buildings close to a mill wheel in the middle ground; turbulent water rushing past large rocks, with a slight fall forming a stream in the foreground; in the background a dense wide wood with mountains looming in the distance under a stormy sky.