A chill nocturnal setting, faintly unsettled in its balance, defines the image, whose plain, almost stubbornly ordinary terrain recalls the discipline of the Pre Raphaelites while carrying a primitive undertone suggestive of a self-taught hand. Only gradually does its context emerge as the earliest known watercolour landscape by Farrer, probably drawn from Brooklyn where he lived most of his life, a work whose exactness, rawness, and eerie mood anticipate later Surrealist concerns.