After studying in Dresden with the Nazarene painter Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Barclay became a close friend of the celebrated Italian painter Giovanni Costa in Rome during the winter of 1871/2. In Rome in 1874, Costa and Barclay held a small joint exhibition of their work. Barclay, like Costa, believed that landscape is shaped by generations of human occupation. He was something of an amateur historian and in the 1880s Barclay began a series of paintings of Stonehenge, about which he wrote a book in 1895. He believed that Stonehenge was 5,000 years younger than we know it to be, and that it had been constructed at the time of Agricola, the Roman governor of Britannia AD 77 to 85 – an eccentric theory even then. During the 1880s, instead of Algerian and Italian subjects, Barclay began to exhibit idyllic subjects of English rural life, and was compared to Fred Walker or JF Millet. When it was exhibited in the Grosvenor Gallery in 1886, our painting was described in Grosvenor Notes as a ‘poetical landscape, glowing in misty morning light; haytime [sic], a mower resting on his scythe, rooks in the air.’ Barclay liked to paint in series; shown with our picture at the Grosvenor Gallery was Cutting Rushes, no 201, in which the same man is at work, a companion to our picture where the man has not yet started. He exhibited a similar painting, but with multiple figures, that same year at the Institute of Painters in Oil Colours, called At Close of Day (no 99).