Yokoyama Taikan was born in Ibaragi Prefecture, but his family soon moved to Tokyo where he was educated. Taikan studied painting briefly with Yuki Masaaki (1834-1904) when he was accepted as a student in the Tokyo Art School, the school founded under Ministry of Education auspices by Okakura Tenshin (1862-1913) to teach Japanese style painting. Taikan studied painting under many masters there, but was particularly impressed with Hashimoto Gaho (1835-1908), the last of the great Kano school painters. Taikan joined the Art School faculty, then participated in the mass resignation when Okakura was dismissed. Taikan became a founding member of the Japan Art Institute in 1898, and remained one of its officers until his death. He traveled to India in 1903 at Okakura's behest, then accompanied Okakura to America in 1904. Taikan often found himself in contention with the Ministry of Education because of his individualism and strong principles, with the result that the Japan Art Institute spent many years outside of the government sponsored competitive exhibition system. In his late years as one of the true patriarchs of nihonga, Taikan became alarmed at the increasingly Western character of nihonga and worked to preserve its traditional basis. In addition to his Art Institute duties, Taikan served as a judge for government sponsored exhibitions such as Bunten and Teiten, judged the Inten, was elected a Court Artist in 1931, was made a member of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in 1935, and was among the first to receive the Order of Cultural Merit in 1937.

The first several decades of Taikan's career were dedicated to finding ways to modernize nihonga by incorporating technical elements from Western painting. His first important innovation was morotai, a revolutionary style of colored painting based upon a complex application of shaded colors with little or no ink line to achieve subtle atmospheric effects. Taikan is also credited with modernizing ink painting by introducing similar shading and textured effects, as well as Western-style perspective.

A smaller version of the composition offered here in the Eisei Repository, entitled "Distant clouds over the sea", is dated to 1936. The two pieces share the same coloring, and much of the arrangement of bright blue against gold, as well as the gold streaks of cloud (published Eisei Bunko hizo: Yokoyama Taikan Chokudai Gaten 1980, pl. 15). Stylistically, this is a legacy of Taikan's morotai painting of the late 1890's-1900's in terms of the blunt daubing strokes and the atmospheric rendering of golden daybreak.