Captain Edward Molyneux was a couturier who Noël Coward first met in Paris in the early 1920s. He designed costumes for Coward's productions of London's Calling, Easy Virtue, and perhaps most famously, the bias cut dress worn by Gertrude Lawrence in the balcony scene in Private Lives. Molyneux and Coward became close friends and this painting is possibly a view from Coward's home, White Cliffs at St. Margaret's Bay in Kent.