Af Klint trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in the 1880s, a conventional, male-dominated institution where she studied drawing and portrait and landscape painting^[2][3]. For decades this was assumed to be her entire body of work. In 1896 she began meeting in secret with four other women artists, together known as The Five, who held regular séances, setting up altar-like spaces, meditating and praying, and recording visions in automatic drawing and writing guided, they believed, by spirits they had contacted^[2].

In 1906 a spirit af Klint called Amaliel asked her to undertake what she described as a great commission: to convey the spiritual world to humanity through painting^[3]. The other members of The Five, worried that such prolonged, intense contact with the spirit world could end in madness, refused to take part, but af Klint accepted the task alone^[2]. The resulting series, Paintings for the Temple, occupied her from 1906 to 1915 and eventually ran to 193 works. She produced an astonishing 111 of them between 1906 and 1908 alone, including ten canvases over three metres high, before taking a four-year break and resuming the project in 1912 to complete it^[3].

The Swan is recorded as the twenty-third work in Group IX/SUW, dated 1915, placing it among the final works af Klint made before the Paintings for the Temple project reached its conclusion that year^[1]. It belongs to the later phase of the commission, made after her return to the series in 1912, when she was still working through the visual vocabulary of interlocking organic forms, circles, spirals and lettering that defines the project as a whole.