According to the Wyeth, he worked on the painting for the whole winter of 1946. It was the first tempera painting he made after the death of his father, N. C. Wyeth, who was hit by a train. Andrew Wyeth said about the picture: "It was me, at a loss—that hand drifting in the air was my free soul, groping."[2] Behind the hill was the location where Wyeth's father had died. Wyeth said he regretted that he never had painted his father's portrait, but that "the hill finally became a portrait of him".[2]
