The Storm

An overloaded cart is stuck in the mud, men strain to push it, sheep huddle together and a storm races across the sky. A critic called it the poetry of a shipwreck.

The story behind the painting

The Storm, in French L'Orage, is also known as The Stalled Cart or Wagon in the Mud. Jean-Honoré Fragonard painted it during his years in Rome, completing it around 1759. It was inspired by the caravan pictures of Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, which were especially admired in Paris at the time. The canvas measures 73 by 97 cm. Wikidata gives no date for it, so the year around 1759 rests on Wikipedia alone. It came to the Louvre in 1869 as part of the bequest of the collector Louis La Caze.

What to look for

Fragonard shows the overloaded cart from an unusually low angle, so it looms above us. It is stuck: men push from behind while the ox bellows in front. Above them the wind whips the cover off the load, and below, sheep press together for shelter. Over everything the storm races in, giving the moment its dramatic tension. Fragonard lets the paint form shapes that stay indistinct and not clearly defined, so the whole scene seems to move with the weather. Watch how the light breaks through the dark clouds.

Meaning and intent

The subject of overloaded vehicles comes from Castiglione, but the overcast sky and the coming storm have more in common with seventeenth-century Dutch masters than with Italian models. Fragonard brings together two traditions in one small drama of effort and weather: humans and animals struggling against mud and wind. The comte de Saint-Victor said the work had the poetry of a shipwreck, and the Goncourt brothers admired its smoky, gloomy, electric sky, cracked with pale daylight.

Legacy

The painting was first shown to the Paris public in 1860, at an exhibition on the Boulevard des Italiens of eighteenth-century French masterpieces that had been held in private collections. It caused a sensation and helped re-establish Fragonard's reputation in the middle of the nineteenth century. Since the 1980s it has travelled widely, to Beijing and Shanghai, New York, Rome, Taiwan, Barcelona, Kyoto and Tokyo, and Louvre-Lens in 2023. A preliminary drawing in red chalk and brown ink, reversed, is in the Art Institute of Chicago, and a similar drawing in Budapest has been attributed both to Fragonard and to Hubert Robert.