This painting forms a pair with Sunset, and was most likely painted at Jacobi’s property in Ardoch, northwest of Kingston, Ontario. However, they are atmospheric studies in the European Romantic tradition more than depictions of a particular local.

Born in Königsberg, East Prussia, Otto Jacobi arrived in Montreal in 1860. He was already a recognized landscape painter in Germany. This fact provided him with immediate respect in Canadian artistic circles, which he frequented in Montreal and Toronto. In 1890, he was elected president of the Royal Canadian Academy. Many of his Canadian landscape paintings were based on photographs and echo the specificity of that medium. Later, he developed a style of non-specific, romantic landscape of which these two are examples. They were shown at the Ontario Society of Artists exhibition of 1878, both titled Upright Landscape.