On returning home from Vienna where he had studied, the young Károly Lotz looked at the Hungarian landscape and people with a fresh eye. Indeed, his excellent observations were way ahead of his age. Although his paintings depicting the landscape of the Great Hungarian Plains during storm were still rooted in Romanticism, their emotional charge, variegated compositional methods and, most of all, their realistic colours justified Lotz's personal ambitions. "Stud in a Thunderstorm", painted in 1862, is an excellent example of these qualities. His depiction of the clouds whirling in the depth of the space, his felicitous rendering of the horses and his ability to capture the feeling and unique world of the people of the flatlands could not be matched by any of his contemporaries.
Lotz was also a renowned fresco painter; he was the first demonstrate in this lesser known genre in Hungary how an architect and a painter could work together in order to achieve a homogeneous work of art.