In the summer of 1955, Picasso bought La Californie, a large and ornate 19th Century villa overlooking Cannes, with views of La Golfe Juan and Antibes. A large room on the ground floor with French windows overlooking the garden was set up as Picasso's studio and for many months this grand space, cluttered with paintings of earlier periods and with the memorabilia with which he liked to be surrounded, served not only as the locus where his works were produced but also as the subject itself of many paintings.

"He was happy at once in the luminous atmosphere of the lofty rooms, and as he had done before, he began to paint pictures inspired by the objects that lay around and the tall windows with their art nouveau tracery, through which a yellow green light is filtered by the branches of the palm trees. Day after day he saw his studio anew. Sometimes the main feature to be placed in the composition was Jacqueline seated in the rocking-chair in front of stacked canvases...In other paintings the pattern of the windows dominated everything, towering high like a cathedral nave; or again cool recesses led the eye deep into the picture, past chairs, sculptures, easels and the Moorish charcoal burner which looked like another relic of Matisse...The last paintings of this series have an austerity of colour and arrangement which strongly recalls the atmosphere of Spain...From the magnificent disorder of his surroundings Picasso has resolved in these paintings a masterly plan of light and space in which everything takes its place with serenity." (R. Penrose, Picasso, His Life and Work, London, 1958, pp. 358-359)