Noel Wood found early success as a painter in his home state of South Australia before moving to north Queensland in 1936. He settled at Doorila Cove on Bedarra Island and his paintings of island life soon captured the public imagination and earned him national renown.

Wood painted Evening, Timana c.1940 during a seminal period in his career that cemented his reputation and reflected his ability to capture the atmosphere of the tropics. It is likely that the painting was shown in ‘An Exhibition of Tropical Paintings’ in December 1940, a display that art dealer and future Moreton Galleries director John Cooper organised at the Princes Ballroom in the Courier Building in Queen Street, Brisbane. The exhibition included artworks by Wood and Roy Dalgarno – who had spent the previous six months on Bedarra – and was commended in the press. The art critic for the Cairns Post, for example, noted that ‘their paintings have captured the rich, luscious colouring of the northern vegetation’, and remarked that Wood had conveyed ‘the dazzling sunlight of the North as no other artist has ever succeeded in doing’.