In this painting, Johannes Võerahansu has most probably depicted the island of Saaremaa. His teacher Ants Laikmaa had urged him to visit Saaremaa, and Võerahansu had done that on several occasions since the 1920s, but a year before the completion of this painting Võerahansu spent an entire month there in summer, roaming about the island and helping ethnographers document farm buildings. Võerahansu developed a liking for Saaremaa, which strongly influenced his oeuvre in the 1930s and even later.
Võerahansu was 34 years old when he created the painting (he was actually 36: for some reason he claimed to be two years younger), but was still a student of Ado Vabbe’s in Pallas because of an interruption in his studies due to economic reasons, forcing him to do odd jobs in his home municipality in Türi. Võerahansu had picked Ado Vabbe as his tutor because of the latter’s improvisation skills and pictorial freedom, which suited Võerahansu’s approach to painting.
Võerahansu first displayed his Saaremaa motifs at exhibitions in 1935. It was said about his works that he “has vivaciously rendered his material with bold brush strokes, his colour scheme is peaceful and his sense of harmony well developed.” In the following year, perhaps after displaying By the Brook, his works were described as sensitive, contemplated and colour-based. In reviews of the 1936 Pallas graduates’ exhibition, he is described as being one of the “leading forces”, whose works contain “a calmness of observation and a stillness of colours.”