After a collapse in health and the diagnosis of tuberculosis, Gertler was confined to Banchory Sanatorium, near Aberdeen, in November 1920 until May 1921. Initially forbidden to paint for long periods, he eventually left with nine completed paintings, three of them landscapes, all observed from his window. The progress of this work, 'the most significant', is charted in letters to his friends between February and May 1921, in which he admitted a fascination for its upright, panel shape. Quentin Bell, in his introduction to Noel Carrington's edition of the artist's Selected Letters, detected in the painting, 'Gertler, the gentle romantic', declaring that 'Here [...] he conveys the softness of atmosphere, the fusion of indefinable shapes, forms that melt into each other, the tender, mysterious ambiguities of landscape in the open air'.

After learning in April that his health was sufficiently improved to leave, Gertler stayed on to complete the landscape, later giving it to one of the doctors in gratitude for his treatment. When the sanatorium later closed in the 1960s, the doctor tracked down Gertler's son, Luke, and presented it to him.