The present paintings must have been painted in Rome just prior to Vernet's return to France in order to complete one of the most important commissions of Louis XV's reign: the set of paintings of the ports of France, a project that took him over ten years to complete and marked the climax of his career (see L. Manoeuvre and E. Rieth, Joseph Vernet (1714-1789): Les Ports de France, 1994). Vernet was very conscious of the interaction between the subject of his paintings, writing for instance in du Dauphin at Versailles 'I would much prefer that these pictures are made to act together and to set each other off' (Vernet in correspondence.... ed. J. Guiffrey, Nouvelles Archivese de l'art français, 3rd series, IX, 1893, p. 50). The concept of the contrast of times of day was already to be found in his famous predecessor, Claude Lorraine, most of whose production was in pairs, but Vernet carried the idiom to new heights, and it is in the small paintings on copper that we see this most clearly. Using a silver ground to give even more qualities of light and color, he could already by the time he left Italy command large sums for works such as these, like the 150 livres he obtained for the pair of landscapes of 1753 listed in his accounts.