From 1917 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner traveled to Davos several for health reasons, and got in touch with Dr. Frédéric Bauer, the then chief physician of the Davos park sanatorium, to undergo treatment. The impressive atmosphere of the Alpine landscape, the special, albeit busy life of the farming families who lived there, and the rural, bucolic idyll were important sources of inspiration for Kirchner in these years. In 1919 he noted: "The good van de Velde wrote to me today that I should better return to modern life. [.] That's impossible for me [.]. Here I have a rich field for my creative activity, that I could hardly harvest in good health, let alone today. The charms of the world are the same everywhere, they only differ in appearance. And here you learn to go deeper than in the so-called 'modern' life, which, despite its wealth of outer form, is so much more shallow." (quoted from: Lucius Grisebach, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 1880-1938, Cologne 1995, p. 153). In the summer of 1920, the year our work was created, the artist lived in the house "In den Lärchen" in Davos Frauenkirch. Here, despite his illness, which flared up time and again, he unfolded a seemingly inexhaustible creative energy and in the colored chalk drawing offered here, too, the artist created a scene focused on two Farmers mowing hay framed by the Davos landscape in violet and light green with energetic, self-confident strokes and strong, bright colors. The diagonal, reddish-brown lines show their work with the scythe. The delicate violet, fresh green and strong yellow used by the artist in the background were also similarly used in the painting "Der Mäher“ (The Mower, Gordon 572) in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. With the scene of the Swiss peasants working with large scythes, rendered on paper so dynamically, Kirchner refers to a traditional subject used by Vincent van Gogh, which he transfers into a masterly, lighthearted expressionist make with the help of an unmistakable visual language entirely free from conventions. [CH]