Gorky painted this picture at a crucial moment in his career when he had finally broken away from the influence of Picasso and Miró, and had begun to develop a very distinctive style of his own. After years of poverty and privation in the 1930s, he married his second wife Agnes ('Mougouch') in September 1941 and entered a happier period of his life. In the summer of 1942 he and his wife spent three weeks in the countryside in Connecticut and Gorky began while there to make drawings from nature. Except for a few sketches in