During the War of Independence (1918–1920), the Estonian cultural public enjoyed summer holidays at Lake Pühajärv as a mixture of bourgeois vacationing and avantgarde creativity. Members of the cultural group Siuru spent several summers there over the years, both together and separately, and Konrad Mägi, who was not part of the group, would occasionally join them. He painted quite a few works by the lakeside and made sketches which he later turned into paintings in his studio. Some of his painting sites are easily identifiable, others are more ambiguous. Mägi stayed at the Saare Farm summer house on the south-eastern side of the lake. He is known to have visited Lake Pühajärv for the first time in the summer of 1897, when he went swimming there with his friends.