Following the painter Manfred Henninger's escape from Germany on 3 March 1933 in anticipation of his imminent arrest by the Nazis for political reasons, he moved to Spain via Switzerland and France. In the late summer of that year he decided to stay for a longer time on Ibiza with his family due to the low cost of living there.

Henninger's painting Hafen von Ibiza shows a view from an elevated perspective of an unrigged sailing ship with a white hull that is being unloaded on the quayside. The painter captures the hustle and bustle of the humans and animals using brusque, judiciously placed brush strokes. The harbour basin, bordered by a built-up coastline and a mountain range on the horizon, stretches behind the ship. "In Spain my palette reached its maximum brightness, caused by the radiant light of the outside world," (ed. trans.) stated Henninger, retrospectively explaining the painting Hafen von Ibiza (Henninger, Ein Bekenntnis zur Malerei, 1947).

The emigrant created a significant body of work numbering roughly 300 paintings while in exile on Ibiza, including numerous portraits for which he purpose-built a shaded studio from bamboo sticks for himself in the garden of his first home. As the Spanish civil war approached in 1936 he was forced to flee precipitously and had to leave almost all the works of art created on the island behind. Henninger only succeeded in recovering a portion of them in the 1950s.