Celebrated as a prodigy at the age of 14, Michallon was awarded the first Prix de Rome for landscape painting by the French Academy in 1817 for his picture "A Woman Struck by Lightening", which depicts a figure crushed by a huge tree limb. This open air study was probably painted as an exercise in anticipation of that competition. It also relates to Michallon's first major commission, "The Oak and the Marsh", an illustration to a fable by Jean de La Fontaine of 1816.