This is one of four versions of the same subject. Hitchens found that painting several versions of one subject enabled him to resolve the painterly problems of interpreting a particular place, or aspect of nature. Although the subject was a specific group of trees, with distant views visible between the trunks, Hitchens insisted that it was not a literal copy of nature. He wrote: 'What I see and feel I try to reduce to patches and lines of pigment which have an effect upon our aesthetic consciousness, independent of (although interpreting) the facts of nature.' Tones and colours produce an equivalent to real space and atmosphere.