Morgenstern grew up in a family of painters and came into contact with the technique of oil studies made on site at an early age. In 1834, he moved to Munich and joined a circle of young landscape painters who found attractive motifs in the foothills of the Alps. Taking pleasure in his own abilities, he depicted the reflection of the Boat sheds in the lake and carved the place and time into the paint. The study is part of a series created at the Kochelsee, which marked his breakthrough to a view of nature liberated from academic conventions. Such studies served as a reservoir of his own memory and occasionally as a model for studio pictures.