L'Orage

Georges Michel's L'Orage (The Storm, c. 1830) is a characteristic work by one of the most unusual French landscape painters of the early nineteenth century — an artist who spent his entire career painting the northern outskirts of Paris, especially the plain of Montmartre and the windmills and quarries of the Buttes-Chaumont, in all weathers and at all hours. Michel was largely unknown and unrecognized in his lifetime, but later critics, particularly Thoré-Bürger and the Barbizon painters, recognized him as a visionary precursor who had taken Dutch landscape painting's naturalism and applied it to Parisian suburban reality.

Michel builds the storm-threatened landscape with rapid, energetic brushwork that conveys the movement of wind and the drama of the approaching storm without sacrificing the specific topography of the Parisian plain. The sky dominates — as in Dutch landscapes he admired — with storm clouds rendered in fluid greys and blacks. The palette is severely restricted, the whole canvas built from variations on grey, ochre, and dark brown.