John Robinson Tait went abroad for the first time in 1853, traveling with his teacher, the American landscape painter William Louis Sonntag (1822 – 1900). An active commentator on the cultural and social scene, Tait not only painted but also wrote travel and poetry books along with art criticism for periodicals. Published in Philadelphia, his travelogue European Life, Legend, and Landscape (1859) helped establish him as a “poet-painter” whose evocative description of the Alps encompassed the “snowy peaks of the Bernese Oberland, which the sunset would enchant into faerie realms; surrounding them with opalescent glow of ineffable beauty; — so far and yet so glowing...” Tait worked in Germany from 1873 until 1876, the year that he created this equally romantic Alpine view. The painting was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1876 and at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1877.