During the war Kirchner suffered a serious nervous breakdown, which brought about his discharge from the army. He then moved to Switzerland and in the little village of Davos he found a mountain hut where he spent his first summer. Months later he had to be admitted to a clinic because of another nervous breakdown. This work was painted during that stay in the mountains and in it we can see the painter hinmself sitting working on an engraving. Everybody around him is an unstable and deformed reality because of the very tension of the painter. There is no longer social criticism here but the manifestation -through the intense colouring and the spatial deformation- of the tense and depressive state of mind of this man with his psychological crises.
