Raphael Ritz, most famous scion of a family of artists in Valais, received first lessons from his father, the portrait and church painter Lorenz Justin Ritz. From 1853-1856 he studied landscape and genre painting at the then leading Düsseldorf Academy. In the summer of 1860 he opened his own studio there and quickly became a sought-after painter idyllic and at the same ethnographic precision geschilderter Swiss genre scenes.

Due to his regular family visits and study he remained closely linked to his home. In 1875, he settled with his wife in the final Wallis down and engaged in the sequence on different cultural levels for its local environment. For example, he was instrumental in establishing the archaeological museum in the Valeria castle in Sion.

This composition is characterized by the special treatment and emphasis on light. Depicted is a peasant woman sitting directly in the focus of bundled through the window incident and penetrated by the smoke of the fire sunbeams. The staging of the light source testifies Raphael Ritz 'confrontation with the artistic currents of his time.

Ritz-Kenner Walter Ruppen commented: "The confrontation with the realism had in fact disintegrated the romantic image unit now the surfaces of things in the different lighting effects were the field picturesque discoveries, liberated on the brushwork and color matter itself." (Walter Ruppen, Raphael Ritz - Life and Work, Vira 1971, p 101)