During his stay in Majorca, Joaquim Mir suffered a terrible fall while painting on the cliffs of the Pareis torrent and the caves at Sa Calobra. Although the exact causes of the accident are unknown, what is certain is that this event accentuated the eccentricities and the incipient mental illness of the painter, as well as his conception of the world. He almost lost his life due to the fall and it caused him grave cerebral damage, obliging him to leave the island of Majorca and be interned in the Psychiatric Institute Pere Mata in Reus for almost two years (1905 and 1906). During his internment, Mir painted the garden of the asylum and its modernist pavilions, the work of the architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner (1849–1923).

This personal episode initiated Mir’s most productive period. He came to be considered one of the most revolutionary landscape painters in Europe, whose work intersects with the first examples of abstraction in the West.

The present painting, excecuted in 1906, is one of the most representative of that moment. This work perfectly demonstrates a new brushstroke technique used by the painter to organise his landscape compositions. The delirious, vertical, sinuous, and fantastic lines of Majorca give way to shorter and more contained brushwork, creating impact. These brushstrokes are united like a mosaic to create a symphony of colours in which the elements are worked up synthetically and intuitively, and appear merely as inferences. An almost incomplete exercise, Mir asks the spectator to complete the landscape mentally. The strokes of the brush construct the vegetal and architectonic elements and the planes of depth by way of creating chromatic masses. The life of nature explodes with colour and acquires a surprising personality, which fuses with the subjective vison of the painter.

With regard to this period, the critic Joaquim Folch i Torres made the following comment: “He now only makes colour. Let us not strive to discover anything through his purely decorative marks. Neither trees, nor air, nor ground, nor any living things, nor dead things. Colours and that is it, blots, and nothing more. But colours and blots that are marvellous, unexpected, that, even if they do not speak of the world, please the eyes. Mir is a case of the extreme exaltation of this principle of colour for the sake of colour”.