The artist spent most of the summers between 1920 and 1931 in Jershöft on the Baltic Sea in Eastern Pomeranian, not far from the peat bogs and marshes characteristic of the Pomeranian Lake District. The small fishing and farming village provided the artist with a sense of calm during a very turbulent post-war period, especially in light of the emerging extremist groups in Weimar politics and above all in his home city of Berlin. Hence, Schmidt-Rottluff devoted his creation to rural life. Works depicting workers, farmers or fishermen going about their daily chores become the motif of his painting and depict people in their social environment.

In these paintings of workers, craftsmen and fishermen, Schmidt-Rottluff conceived a colorful surface painting. Zones of pure colors interlock and give a dynamic rhythm to the surface. At times, the forms even seem to dissolve into an almost colorful abstraction within the surface, whereby reference to the actual motif always remains. The artist also uses the dark contours to define different shapes and creates a certain spatiality through the order of the individual parts of the picture. Spacious, simplified, almost geometrically rendered forms and large surface areas determine the character of the composition, which Schmidt-Rottluff also takes up, for example, in the similar painting "Fischer mit roten Netzen" (1921, part of the Hermann Gerlinger Collection until 2023). In the watercolor offered here, however, the artist does not depict the fishing activity, but rather the physically hard work of cutting peat, depicting the people without the usual physiognomy in an expressive movement. These are rhythmic pictorial processes that appear in his works for the first time. Nevertheless, something of the expressive surface style of the pre-war period echoes in the works of the post-war years, but the works create a far more emotional, less serene impression. [MvL]