Millard Sheets made this work on the spot while traveling through the Kansas Dust Bowl. (Many midwestern farmlands were destroyed by drought and dust storms in the 1930s, and Sheets stated that “the bleakness in the painting is symbolic of the period.”) With his American subject matter and skillful handling of the medium, the California-based artist earned national acclaim for his watercolors at the time, with critics regularly comparing him to the celebrated masters Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper.