Between 1933 and 1938, Arthur Dove and his wife Helen Torr lived in Geneva, New York.  This was among the most prolific periods of Dove’s career, and he embarked on an extended series of intimately scaled works that vividly captured the rolling landscape.

"Green Sun" is typical of the watercolors of these years. Rather than painting the sun as a radiant disc, Dove chose to reverse the color of the sun to suggest the after-image left on the retina after staring at intense light. By emphasizing the subjective rather than objective reality, "Green Sun" captures, in Dove’s words, “the first flash [that] will give the truth of one’s feelings.”