Exhibited: Charlottenborg 1890 no. 619.

'Le peintre du soleil' – the painter of the sun. This was the poetic and concise moniker given to Schønheyder Møller by the French author and art critic Léon Bazalgette (1873–1928) in the preface to the artist's retrospective exhibition at the Palais de Beaux-Arts in Liège in 1908, three years after his untimely death in 1905. Schønheyder Møller was in fact strongly preoccupied and fascinated by the sun and the light, as can also be observed in the present painting. As the title of the work indicates, we are in the middle of a thunderstorm, but despite the dark clouds, the sun breaks through outside the painting and lights up the cornfields and casts shadows on the village's red and white farmhouses, thus evoking many fine transitions between light and shadow.

After his death, Schønheyder Møller fell into oblivion, and he has largely remained so until today, where there is a strongly increasing interest in the artist and his works. He was a close friend of Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916), and in 2021, his works were on display at the exhibition “Fremkaldelser. Vilhelm Hammershøi, Valdemar Schønheyder Møller and photography” at the Hirschsprung Collection, and his artistic significance has thus been illuminated.