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The painting is coupled with another one in private possession, painted in 1934, titled "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her." With this work, Bánáti Sverák won the scholarship to Rome. Both pictures have its scenes situated outside the town. In the background, the buildings of Szentendre and its surroundings can be clearly distinguished. In the foreground, there are figures in historical costume. The fore- and the background are clearly separated; the vivid, almost homogeneous colour surfaces have a decorative effect.
In the picture titled "On the Pillory" not only the main character, a naked female figure standing in the middle but also the side characters, whose models, as tradition says, were some of the town-dwellers, and who - in spite of all the gesticulations - participate in the scene standing motionless around the sinner, looking in the distance. The female nude also represents a beauty ideal of some kind, with an idealized face character and a posture recalling that of the slave awakening from his dream created by Michelangelo. The picture is saturated with a melancholic feeling enhanced with the colours covered in grey tones.
The costumes evoking the atmosphere of various periods of history - as well as that of the present - direct the attention to the environment given, to Szentendre and the current period, the 30s. The picture has an educative message: the story and its lesson are valid here and now as well.
Classicistic stylistic endeavours can be observed in the works of almost all the painters working at the Szentendre artists' colony in the first half of the 1930s: besides Italian orientation, there are trends keeping alive the so-called Arcadia-painting of the 20s. Bánáti Sverák's concept is different from them. His classicism is particularly combined with details true to the current age and compositional methods referring back to Renaissance antecedents.
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