Although Gillies taught at Edinburgh College of Art for forty years, he frequently travelled around the Scottish countryside to paint the landscapes which form the bulk of his artistic output. This painting shows an area near Durisdeer, a small village at the foot of the Lowther Hills in Dumfries and Galloway. Gillies’s work of the early 1930s owes much to the moody Expressionism of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. Gillies had visited the Munch exhibition in Edinburgh in 1931 and was deeply affected by the artist’s ability to convey emotion.