Chaim Soutine was born in 1894 in Smilovitch, a small village in Russian Lithuania. A son of a poor Jewish tailor he was the tenth of eleven children. By the time he was sixteen, he began to pursue a career in the arts, going to Minsk to study painting and later to the School of Fine Arts in Vilna. In 1913, having saved enough money for a train ticket, he made the great journey to Paris, the world capital of art.

Soon after his arrival, Soutine established himself on the left bank. He moved into an old pavilion built for a Paris Exposition which had been transformed into artists studios and was known as "La Ruche" (the Beehive). There, he shared a studio with Chagall, Kisling, Modigliani and Lipchitz, a group of mostly foreign artists known today as the School of Montparnasse.

Soutine's poverty in those first years in Paris
was almost unendurable; it was the kind of gnawing,
continual want that can break one's will to work
or live. It left a permanent scar on him both
physically and emotionally. During this time he
would occasionally obtain work as a porter at the
railway station, and during the war as a ditch
digger. In later years Soutine recounted standing
at the café for hours, hoping that someone would
buy him a café crème or a sandwich. Stories
of this abject poverty and his notorious
uncleanliness at this time are legion. The most
poignant anecdotes - such as the tales about how
Soutine tried to keep armies of bugs away from his
bed with pans of paraffin, or how he made underpants
serve as a shirt - testify both to his stubborn
tenacity and his ingenuity in the face of hardship.
But for Soutine these years were hardly less bitter
than earlier times in Lithuania. Certianly he
never recalled them as romantic or adventurous;
whatever energy was left from his work was devoted
to staying alive. (M. Tuchman, op. cit., p. 16)

The present painting was included in the first major Soutine exhibition to be organized in this country at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1951. In his exhibition catalogue Monroe Wheeler discussed the present work as follows:

Soon after the strong Ceret pictures, and so different
in style that it is like a reversal of esthetics, comes
a large view of Cagnes mainly in dark emerald and
vibrant yellow, with a little mother-of-pearl house at
the left. Once more all is tipped over sidewise but
not this time as in an earthquake. The composition,
held together with an armature of dark trees, is so
strong that the earth stands firm under it. In spite
of the brilliant sunshine, there is an effect of storm,
of wind hissing and foliage whipping, and the walls of
the hill town seem responsive to this, the rooftops
belabored as by lightning strokes. (exh. cat.,
Soutine, 1950, op. cit., pp. 48-49, 65)