In 1915, the newlyweds Jon-And and Cleve settled in a studio at S:t Eriksgatan 63 in Stockholm. The studio was located on Kungsholmsstrand, next to Sankt Eriksbron, with the neighbourhood Atlasområdet on the other side of the water.
Cleve only had to look out of the studio window to find motifs that were ideally suited to be distilled and interpreted according to the principles of Futurism and Cubism.
The advent of the modern machine age, illustrated by the steam locomotive, had already served as the subject of Joseph Mallord William Turner's ‘Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway’ in 1844. In 1877, Claude Monet executed his famous suite of paintings depicting the Gare Saint-Lazaire in Paris. In these paintings, the frustrated steam locomotives are wrapped in clouds of smoke that linger beneath the station's glass-clad cast-iron architecture.
In the catalogue number, which is a pre-study for a painting from 1915-16 (cf. Bukowski Auktioner, Familjen Andersson Samling (Andersson Family Collection) H042, 2012, cat. no. 35), Cleve has allowed the clouds of smoke to spread across the entire canvas, where they become stylised building blocks of the modernist composition. The motif, inspired by the fragmented pictorial space of Cubism, is given additional tension by Futurism's focus on movement and energy as the train rushes under the three arched spans of the Sankt Eriksbron bridge.