A large and ambitious oil by Joseph Jansen (1829–1905) showing the Mont Blanc massif seen from St.-Martin-Sallanches in Savoie. Jansen trained at the Düsseldorf Academy, then Europe's leading school of landscape painting, alongside contemporaries such as Andreas Achenbach and Johann Wilhelm Schirmer.

Jansen's Alpine views combine the Düsseldorf School's meticulous natural observation with a Romantic sense of scale, exemplified here by the sweeping panorama of Mont Blanc rising above the Savoie valley – a substantial and impressive example of his mature work.

As a traditional landscape painter Jansen was an archetypical product of the Düsseldorf School of painting but also one of the more successful ones. Although Jansen was born in Aachen, by the age of 17 he was enrolled in Germany's leading school of landscape painting which had developed in the wake of the German Romantic movement. Like his now better-known contemporaries such as Andreas Achenbach, Carl Friedrich Lessing and Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, Jansen absorbed the Düsseldorf School's combination of close natural observation with Romantic atmosphere.