During the 1880s, Renoir became increasingly dissatisfied with the techniques of Impressionist painting. He felt that the rapid application of paint, without the aid of preparatory sketches or a premeditated composition, led to work which lacked the monumentality and permanence which he felt constituted great art.

Renoir worked with Cézanne at La Roche-Guyon, a village on the Seine between Paris and Rouen, and there developed his own version of Cézanne's 'constructive stroke' - that is the application of a series of evenly weighted, parallel brushstrokes. Renoir wanted to make his manner of Impressionism as solid and monumental as that of Cézanne. Unlike Cézanne however, he did not completely subordinate the natural view to the two-dimensional picture surface. Here he varies his brushwork in the trees, the middle ground and the distance, and carefully blends them to give the effect of a gradual recession to the hills beyond. The crisp structure of tones and colours in this work can be compared to another landscape entitled La Roche-Guyon painted in 1885, now in the City Art Gallery of Aberdeen.