Although he died at the early age of thirty-three, Müller had travelled extensively in Europe and beyond, and produced a wide range of subjects. In this painting, and typical of much of his style, he is working in the Dutch 'realist' manner of Jacob van Ruisdael. Indeed, the composition seems to have been inspired by that artist's famous Mill at Wijk in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, which Müller may have known through an engraving. In this landscape, his enthusiasm for the substance of oil paints and their uses in expressing such natural phenomena as windswept sea and the sky is very clear.

Müller's attitude to his art was thoroughly modern, and shot through with Romantic energy and passion: 'I want to paint', he exclaimed, 'it's oozing out of my fingers'. He was devoted to painting out-of-doors rather than in the studio, in close communion with the landscape, like Constable making written and graphic notes of light and weather. 'I do hope to see a storm', he noted during a painting tour of Wales, 'I long to see one'.