"The First Morning" is the completed oil based on a drawing of the same title from Raymond Jonson's diary.  Jonson began keeping a diary in 1918, prior to his touring with the Chicago Little Theatre for which he was Graphic Arts Director and a stage, lighting, and costume designer.

In 1918, Jonson toured the Midwest and also lives and paints in Wyoming, Utah, Idaho and Colorado.

In Ed Garman's seminal 1976 monograph on Jonson he writes:  "Paintings with such metaphorical titles as "Light" and "The First Morning" are works which in their directness and abstract character are related to the main direction of Jonson's evolution.  

The First Morning was completed five months after a second summer at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.  Hi diary entry says, "It is finished and is a great success!" I am happy."  Garman continues that Jonson was happy because "he was able to convey a particular mood he had experienced from the locan landscape through painterly terms.  The sinuous horizontals, the haze of color, the elimination and minimization of local detail tha might be connected directly with a literal transcription of a particular scene are steps toward abstraction.  The painting is not a scene directly from nature but emotional impressions resynthesized in terms of painting and given the look and appea of the mood quality inherent in this type of landscape."