On 17 May 1903, Kandinsky wrote to Gabriele Münter about a summer trip planned by the students of his painting class at the Phalanx school: "After searching for a long time and many endless discussions, we decided to go to Kallmünz." The picturesque village, with its hilltop medieval castle and old colorful houses along winding roads, is situated north of Regensburg at the convergence of the Vils and Naab rivers in eastern Bavaria. From 5 June until 12 August of that summer, Kandinsky spent most of his time with six students painting en plein air in Kallmünz and the surrounding countryside of the Oberpfalz.
Upon his arrival, Kandinsky lived among his students at the Wirtshaus Zur roten Amsel, near the Vils bridge and the village mill. Later in June, Gabriele Münter joined Kandinsky, despite her fears that the students would notice their love affair, and Kallmünz became the cradle of the two artists' romance. Kandinsky's and Münter's relationship became serious during this summer, and at the end of August Kandinsky offered her an engagement ring, along with the large gouache Die Nacht (Spazierende Dame), now housed in the Lenbachhaus, Munich, as tokens of his commitment.
Kallmünz-Vilsgasse I (Rosa Landschaft) exemplifies the important relationship between Kandinsky's early work and the Neo-Impressionist work of Vincent van Gogh, whose paintings Kandinsky had greatly admired at the 1903 Munich Secession. Under this influence, Kandinsky's use of the palette knife to apply paint in heavily impastoed and coarse strokes infused his paintings with an expressive weight of color that, in its immediacy and simplicity, suggested a departure from his carefully constructed compositions and a move toward the artist's later abstractions.