Courbet's love affair with the sea ebbed and flowed throughout his career, from crashing waves to calm, quiet, coastal views. Born in the rugged mountainous terrain around Ornans, in the Franche-Comté, Courbet only first glimpsed the sea in 1841 on a visit to Normandy with his childhood friend, Ourbain Cuenot. His interest in the sea as a subject aligned with various visits to different coastal towns throughout Normandy, along the English Channel, and on the Mediterranean. Painted in Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer at the end of August in 1867, La Trombe is a dramatic departure from otherwise seemingly infinite views of the sea painted during this period, where a low horizon separates water and sky. The whirling spirals of wind and water–a waterspout–rain down in thinly painted thrashes of black, blue, and gray, while backlit clouds hover ominously over darting sailboats drifting in the distance. A smaller version of a similar subject, painted in 1866, is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

What distinguishes La Trombe from the Philadelphia painting and other stormy seascapes by Courbet, for example The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s The Waterspout painted a few years later, is the presence of the female figure standing atop a rock at right. Facing the churning waters and dwarfed by the enormity of the tornado at sea, she raises her arms skyward in awe, a frightful reprise of a similar figure in a calmer seascape Courbet painted earlier in Palavas.