Shishkin was born in 1832 into a Russian merchant family in Yelabuga, then in Vyatka Governorate (today the Republic of Tatarstan), beside the Kama River some 200 km (120 mi) east of Kazan.

It includes two common elements from Shishkin's work: pine trees, and a road leading away from the viewer.

Two earlier works in the collection of the Tretyakov, made by Shishkin in the 1860s, show travellers among fields of rye.

The work is based on a pencil sketch of a field of rye near Lekarevo, which the artist made during a trip with his daughter in 1877, on which he wrote "Эта" (Russian for 'this one').

A country track leads off into the field, with the tiny heads of two people barely visible amid the rye.