Painted in the mid 1930's, New England Landscape belongs to the formative years of Kyōhei Inukai II's career, shortly after he established himself in New York. Educated at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League, Inukai was developing his voice as a painter while supporting himself through commercial art and advertising. He held his first one-man show in 1934, at the California Arts Club, of which his mother was a member. The next year, he contributed an oil painting, “Spring, Montauk” to a show at the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation in New York. His extensive travels informed his Impressionist-inspired approach to color and composition, eventually leading to his landmark 1947 solo exhibition at the Galérie de l'Elysée in Paris, the first by an American artist in a Paris gallery following the Liberation.

While this work reflects the artistic legacy of his father, Kyōhei Inukai (1875–1954), who devoted his career to portraiture rooted in academic realism, his son embraced landscape as a vehicle for experimentation with color, structure, and modernist composition. Yet the younger artist inherited his father's disciplined draftsmanship and commitment to painterly craftsmanship, qualities that underpin even his most expressive works. This dialogue between tradition and innovation would define his career, eventually leading him away from representational painting toward the geometric abstractions and serigraphs for which he became best known after assuming his father's name in 1954 as a tribute to his legacy.