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Provenance: Circolo Scandinavo / Skandinavisk Forening i Rom (Inv. No. AII 9).

Claus Anton Kølle began his artistic career as an apprentice to a decorative painter before being admitted to The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, where he continued his decorative studies. During his time at the Academy, he also experimented with portrait and landscape painting. He exhibited several portrait and figure paintings, but landscape painting ultimately became his preferred subject. This proved to be a wise choice, and in 1860 he was rewarded for his work with a two-year scholarship from the Academy.

Kølle set off the same year he received the scholarship, spending most of the two years in and around Rome. It was here that he met the portrayed Swedish scientist Robert Rubenson, who was in Rome in the early 1860s as part of an extensive meteorological research project that also took him to Germany and France.

C. A. Kølle died at the young age of 45, and since landscape painting was his primary focus, there exists only a few portrait and figure paintings executed by him, including the present drawing.