"Late Afternoon, San Luis Potosi, Mexico" was painted shortly before Mannen moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, to teach art at new Mexico State University. The painting is typical of Mannen's work in many ways: it is a stormy landscape, painted in watercolors with predominantly dark tonalities. In Mannen's paintings, the horizon is placed very low, and the sky is very expressively painted and stormy in appearance. This is also true of the watercolors of Arthur Dove, Charles Burchfield, and John Marin, all of whose work Mannen's has been compared with.
