This painting's genesis, Strindberg described in the essay "New trends in art! or by chance in artistic creation. Here he tells of how he first wanted to paint "a shaded forest interior, where you can see the sea at sunset." After having painted a while he notices that he can not see any sea, but instead, in the bright middle part "an infinite perspective of pink and bluish light, where the airy, disembodied, indeterminate beings hover around like fairies with a trailer of the clouds" . He notes that the forest has become a cave and that the foreground looks like rocks covered with lichen. Strindberg is working here as a kind of random method, the painting is created in an interplay between the conscious effort to bring about a certain subject and the deviations from the subject painter discovers during the process.

Until 2010, it was the most expensive Swedish painting ever sold at an auction in Sweden, sold by Bukowskis in 1990. Two years later it was auctioned off in a forced sale by Stockholm Auktionsverk. It was successfully bidded for by Karl Otto, Elisabeth, Pontus, Eva and Åke Bonnier, who donated it to Nationalmuseum.