This romantic drawing in luminous blue and white chalks, nuanced with greys and greens, is typical of the Austrian artist Mediz-Pelikan's delicate works on paper, producing an ethereal silvery effect, by moonlight. It was probably drawn in the open air in the Dolomites, on one of the intrepid summer camping trips she made with her husband and collaborator the painter Karl Mediz. In one of the only contemporary accounts of their work to be published in English, the British-Austrian art historian Amelia Sarah Levetus, who must have known the couple, wrote that ‘These two artists are man and wife; they have wandered in many places together, over the highest mountains and across glaciers, on the banks of deep rivers and on their pilgrimages have painted scenery and portraits and everything else between. They have endured the greatest hardships together and have worked together; they have chosen the same subjects for their canvases, yet their individualities remain, and in similar subjcets also there is a great variety of treatment...Frau Mediz-Pelikan also has immense energy, combined with poetry of expression more delicate than that of her husband; she loves to paint lavenders and silver greys, to bring out the very depths of that which she is depicting.’

As a young woman Emilie Pelikan studied in Vienna under Albert Zimmermann at the Academy of Fine Arts, whom she then followed to Munich in 1885. Following his death in 1888, Pelikan moved to an artists colony in Dachau, where she met the Viennese painter Karl Mediz. In 1890 Pelikan held her first solo exhibition in Knokke, Belgium, where she reconnected with Mediz. The two were married the following year in Vienna and thereafter worked together in an intense collaboration.

In 1898 Mediz-Pelikan participated in the inaugural Vienna Secession exhibition, and in 1901 was included in the Internationale Kunstausstellung in Dresden, where her work was shown alongside Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Anders Zorn,, Whistler, Lucien Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, and GF Watts. This is the time of her greatest success, and the year our painting is dated. Around 1904/5 Mediz-Pelikan was made an honorary member of the Hagenbund, which did not formally accept women until 1924.

In 1908, at the age of 47, Mediz-Pelikan died suddenly of a heart attack. Her husband had considered her the greater artist, and was devastated by the loss, becoming a recluse and rarely exhibiting his or his wife's work. Following his death in 1945 their daughter Gertrude and the East German Government, who owned most of the pictures, refused to allow any exhibitions, leading to both artists falling into relative obscurity. In the past two decades, her work has been acquired various institutions, including the Albertina, the Kupferstich-Kabinett, the Getty, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Met. In 2019, her work was included in a ground breaking exhibition, City Of Women: Female artists in Vienna from 1900 to 1938 at the Belvedere in Vienna.