This expressive watercolor, associated with the "fairytale" 'Bagatelles' series, was a gift to the psychiatrist Dr. Poul Bjerre, who had greatly helped Kandinsky in presenting his works to Swedish viewers.

Depictions of specific people were not typical of Kandinsky, making this work one of the few exceptions. We see Dr. Poul Bjerre standing under a tree, looking at a bird, and the artist Ernst Norlind on horseback, with a brightly colored landscape in the background reminiscent of Kandinsky's early "folklore" works. Surely, Kandinsky could not help but fill these images—connecting the fairy-tale and the real—with meaning.

Art critics have offered several interpretations of the painting, but it seems that Poul Bjerre expressed this best of all—on the back of the picture itself:

"The bird that I am staring at so intently should be interpreted psychoanalytically as a man picking at himself. The lake could be any lake and the house could be any house. But one should note that Mrs. Münter, whom Kandinsky visited, was at our country farm in September of the previous year. It is perhaps our special lake that you see and fields and woods with firs and such as you see from a train window.

"The round jam cake is the midnight sun and the curved rays are the northern lights—one supposes. On the left is Kölen and the other high mountains on the border with Norway. This is simple. But what is meant by the big sugarloaf-like flaming thing which is the immediate goal of Norlind's hunt? On this point the interpreters have very different opinions. Some are reminded of a tunnel; others of a symbolic road that goes upwards over the mountains to the sky." (P. Bjerre, quoted in V. E. Barnett, op. cit., pp. 41–42).

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