Joseph Vernet was the most distinguished member of a family of artists that originated in Avignon. His earliest landscape paintings, executed for the Marquise de Simiane at Aix-en-Provence in 1731, already demonstrate a profound appreciation of the works of Claude Lorraine, Gaspard Dughet and Salvador Rosa, artists whose works would remain constant throughout Vernet's oeuvre for the rest of his life.

In 1734 the artist went to Rome, where he studied at the French Academy, possibly with Adrien Manglard, a French painter who specialized in coastal scenes. Within a few years Vernet was well established as one of the preeminent view-painters, of real or imagined sites in Italy. His dramatic Italian scenes appealed both to local collectors as well as to visitors on the Grand Tour, who acquired them as souvenirs of their trip.

Documentation of Vernet's first pictures in Italy is scant, but we do know enough of the artist's work in the 1740's to be confident in dating the present unpublished painting in the first half of that decade. With its wild foreground vividly in apposition to the placid blue sea this landscape is manifestly indebted to Salvator Rosa, then revered as the romantic painter par excellence. The rugged cliff setting with its cave-like recesses owes much to Rosa, as do the figures at the left—a pair of praying travelers kneeling before a solitary preacher who gestures, book in hand, towards his grotto altar. Similar Rosa-derived figures are to be found in Vernet's Le Matin of 1743-45 (formerly Winkins Coll., Paris) and its hardly coincidental that at exactly this time Vernet is documented as having painted a copy of Rosa's Atilius Regulus in the Colonna Gallery.