Farm animal paintings by Kathleen Munn (1887-1974) from the mid-1910s, including Cows on a Hillside, signalled a dramatic evolution in her work: her animals graze in carefully arranged kaleidoscopes of bold colours and are unlike any painted in Canada at the time. During her studies in New York and her frequent visits to galleries and museums there, she was exposed to the most advanced art of her time, including the art of the German Expressionist painter Franz Marc (1880–1916) and others associated with the influential Blaue Reiter group. 

Strident colour began to dominate her painting: she was influenced by her explorations of Synchromist colour theory and by the work of Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890–1973) and her teacher Max Weber (1881–1961), both proponents of the use of colour to define form and release paintings from a literal description.