After seeing work by Edvard Munch at the SSA in Edinburgh in 1931, Gillies said that the exhibition ‘shook me’, adding, ‘and I had a fairly long spell of violent, sweeping, sometimes almost expressionist landscapes’. Inspired by Munch, he would paint his own life, remembering his time in the trenches and disintegrating landscape as if shaken by war.
There are also echoes of Derain here, and a lone tree in the centre of the landscape. This motif began to appear in the 1930s and evidence suggests it is Gillies painting ideas of self into the landscape. Klee talked of the artist as tree, and Gillies’ lone trees have a distinctly human feel to them as they assume different characters in different paintings.