Sutherland made his first trip to the South of France in 1947 and subsequentely spent some time there every year. In 1955 he bought a house in Menton. He was fascinated by the new landscape, its vegetation and its insects and devoted a series of paintings to the cicada. Depicted standing upright on the brightly coloured pink background this composition is closely related to the Standing Form series of paintings he produced in 1951-2 and the 1951 Origins of the Land, now in the collection of the Tate Gallery, London