Jama and his family set off from Ogulin in Croatia towards Vienna in the autumn of 1907. He painted now-lost works with the motif of willows in Gerasdorf, northeast of the imperial capital, where he moved his family a year later. A yearning for useful new motifs and financial troubles forced him to move, though he was already on the hunt for an apartment in and around Stein. The landscape soon bored him, as it had nothing to offer but willows and the streams that industrial growth had forced to be regulated. “The motifs I had here were boring, with just one melody: willows,” he wrote in a letter to Jakopič. For this work, he smeared a canvas his wife had already painted beforehand. When the painting made its way from an exhibition at Jakopič’s Pavillion to state acquisition in 1909, the artist was terrified that the upper layer of white paint would suck up some cheap Kaplack (a synthetic red pigment) and render the painting’s white surface pink. He dated the painting from memory to the end of 1908. This motif of a fertile, open plain dotted with willows and pockets of snow was first entitled The Winter Sun, his own version of the widespread celebration of landscapes among Slovenian impressionist painters. From right to left in a vague diagonal meanders a dry stream bed, doubling back towards the right and into the center of the painting before hitting the edge. It is bordered by thawing snow on the north-facing bank, though the southerly winds have melted it elsewhere. Willows grow along the streambed, sprouting their branches up towards the sky. Their thin shadows suggest the noon-time sun of a clear December day. He articulated the fleeting impression of the misty, timid plain, spreading out towards the horizon and the sky, with short, thick strokes of paint applied with a painter’s trowel.