Impressionist painters both in France and America were interested in capturing a sense of immediacy. They emphasized new compositional devices such as plunging perspective, cropped forms, and compositions balanced asymmetrically. Earlier painters going back to the Renaissance favored more closed and clearly balanced compositions. Often pyramidal in form, the central image was flanked on either side with similarly weighted forms. These artists tended to create landscapes that were framed on each side by trees or other structures, and where recession into space was created by carefully measured intervals. Impressionist painters favored asymmetrical compositions such as that employed in this work by Edward Rook where the bushy laurel below is visually balanced by the tree above.