Like many American Impressionists, Henry Hammond Ahl received academic training in Europe, studying at the Royal Bavarian Academy in Munich, and then returned home, where he eventually adopted a wholly Impressionist painting style. In the early years of the twentieth century Ahl often travelled to New England to spend summers and to paint. Around 1920 he purchased a home in Newburyport, Massachusetts and continued to pursue landscape painting, exhibiting at Doll and Richards, and Vose Galleries in Boston. Ahl became known as a painter of meadows and pastures, and Landscape with Irises is most likely a depiction of a field in the vicinity of Newburyport. Both the palette of purples and greens as well as the soft, broken brushwork reveal the artist's mastery of Impressionist technique.