Grigorescu placed his easel in nature, under a sky as if covered by a veil, to register on the canvas the filtered, calm and equal light of an autumnal noontime. He watched with particular attention the effects of plasticity and colour that vegetation provided in its materiality, viewed up close. With the horizon line, he separated the sky and the earth (equally on the right-hand side, while the left side favours vegetation), so as to avoid monotony. For the same purpose, the line of the young tree that crosses the work along its height divides the area of the canvas into two carefully proportioned areas: 1/3 and 2/3.
A careful study of painting seems to indicate that the artist completed the work in two successive stages in the same session. He may have first sketched the entire placement of the motif on the page, using the brush. In the second stage, over the thin layer of colour, he distributed in places accents of pictorial matter from the top of the brush, using brief strokes, forming an additional compositional balance, admirably sustained. The painting belongs to the maturity period of his work, when no secrets were left for the plein air landscape artist in correlating direct observation with the swift and sure pictorial gesture that instantly captured the fleeting nature. Grigorescu confessed to his friend, Vlahuță, about this conditioning of the painter when faced with the motif in nature:
“All things outside must be done quickly, snatched on the fly. One only encounters the same landscape bathed in the same light and viewed with the same mood once in a lifetime. That is why it is so important to be able to work quickly. That symphony of lines, tones, shadows and light, that twinning of all the elements that make something beautiful, under the ray of a happy moment, will be gone forever. In an hour, the face of the world has changed, and you yourself are different.” (Vlahuță, 1910, p. 176, 178).
Some landscapes created in the same vision, perhaps even in the face of the same motif, are part of the suite that Grigorescu dedicated to this way of painting en plein air: Autumn (MNAR/GARM, inv. 69647/7587); Landscape (MNAR/GARM, 69634/7574; 32.5 x 56 cm) and so on. Along with the strokes of his gestures and knife accents, the artist returned to the system in works of great pictorial beauty, created in France in the summer of 1880: Old Woman at Brolles (MNAR/ GARM, inv. 3348), Woman from Brittany (MNAR/ GARM, inv. 69652/7592).
