This work was painted in Pembrokeshire in Wales. Sutherland first visited Wales in 1934 and returned at regular intervals throughout the decade. It was here that he began to be aware of the landscape; at first attempting to paint on the spot but abandoning this for small sketches made on the back of envelopes or in a small sketchbook of forms that he found of interest and which would nourish his ideas. He began to see a kind of presence in certain natural elements and endowed them with human overtones.

The form in this painting is based on a fallen tree lying on a grassy bank at the entrance to a lane. The artist has given the tree a quasi-human form set against vivid green. A painting on the same subject is in the collection of the Tate (www.tate.org.uk)