The artist painted this piece during his first stay in New York city—where he had arrived in December 1927 with a scholarship from the Board of Studies—for his exhibition at the Knoedler Gallery.

It is at this time that he decided to forgot the bright palette that characterised his early works and started choosing greyer hues and more sombre lighting, elements that will appear in his later works, as is the case of the mining landscapes he paints in Asturias, which fit into what the artist himself called his “black period”.

The paradoxes rooted in modernity are reflected in a city like New York, where the contradictions and conflicts of the rhythms of two opposing worlds are manifest: the skyscrapers of Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridge as the backdrop to a horse-drawn cart that evinces a rural world that still exists in the great city. This piece is a clear paradigm of a nature that is gradually being displaced by the presence of man.

We ought to note how the composition is dominated by the sea and sky, emphasising the reflection of the atmospheric phenomena that the artist was so interested in at the time, as well as the visual innovation involved in cutting off the figures found at the bottom edge of the painting.