This picture is one of the rare instances in Alan Reynolds’ art in which figures and a narrative element play a role. In Keeper of the Dark Copse (Tate Gallery), shown in the same exhibition, figures again play a key part but human interaction in the landscape is an unusual theme for the artist.

The picture was in Reynolds’ first one man show at the Redfern Gallery in 1953. He had shown previously in group exhibitions at the gallery to considerable critical acclaim and the new exhibition almost sold out within a week. Buyers included the National Gallery of South Australia, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

Reynolds writing in the exhibition catalogue saw the painter’s dilemma as ‘’a problem of solving equations tonal, linear and so on. The subject or motif must be transformed and become an organic whole. Poetry is never absent from Nature, but alone it cannot constitute a work of art. It must be reconciled with the elements of design and composition. Laying emphasis on the formal values in a work will therefore result in a degree of abstraction. This is, to me, the logical development of the motif towards its transformation into a picture.’’