The work is a study taken from the 1889 painting of the same name kept at the Segantini Museum in St. Moritz. The topic addressed is emblematic of Giovanni Segantini's entire production, rural life and the peasant subject, cornerstones of poetics, a sort of primordial conception of things, devoid of sentimental, populist and pathetic intentions, but aimed at exploring the part more intimate than that nature so loved by the artist and the ultimate and unique goal of his research. Compared to the original, the small painting, dated 1891, includes only the silhouette against the light of the woman bent over at work, reaching an absolute synthesis in which the human being stands alone between the dimensions of the earth and the sky. Despite its reduced size, the painting, arched at the top like an altarpiece, has a decidedly epic accent, and gives dignity and solemnity to that rural work that in Segantini becomes a symbol of effort and acceptance. The composition, with a classic and perfectly balanced tone, contrasts the powerful figure in the foreground with the hinted image of a man near a cart loaded with hay emerging from the otherwise desolate horizon, which dialogues with the richness of the chromatic texture of the disordered field , cluttered with dry grass.