After a short period at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bruges between 1899 and 1900, Spilliaert spent most of his career as a self-taught artist in his native Belgian town of Ostend. Born twenty years after the prominent members of the Symbolist generation (that of 1860), he nevertheless adhered to this aesthetic, which he continued well beyond 1900.

He produced a series of still lifes, self-portraits, and landscapes, all marked by an atmosphere of disquieting strangeness. Mainly produced on paper, these works explore all the resources of black through techniques as diverse as pencil, Indian ink, pastel, and gouache. We should no doubt see in this bias a kind of pessimism (primarily fuelled by the reading of Edgar Allan Poe and Nietzsche) but also a counterpoint to the tutelary figures of symbolism such as Odilon Redon (famous for his blacks), Eugène Carrière, and the American Whistler.

In May 1928, the Spilliaert family moved opposite Leopold Park in Brussels, allowing the artist to observe the trees at leisure. This park, formerly the Eggevoord estate, was transformed into a public garden at the end of the 19th century. It contains several infrastructures, including a mill.

In the spirit of his representations charged with mystery and solitude, expressed by empty and sometimes disturbing landscapes, we have a complex composition characteristic of the artist's work here. Spilliaert plays with the shape of the naked trees in the foreground, which are cut out in shadow on a mill with large wings in a greyish night sky. A black bird balances the composition in the upper right-hand corner of the picture and accentuates the disturbing aspect of the twilight scene.

Spilliaert multiplies the mediums to give this night scene a surprising luminosity and intense depth. This work finds watercolor, gouache, India ink, brush, and pen.