Cézanne stayed in Gardanne during the winter of 1885-1886. It was a unique moment in his artistic career. What he was interested in was the location of the village, not its shops or inhabitants. For him the village was an assembly of buildings. Some of the paintings of L’Estaque had already prefigured this interest for almost monochromatic (brick red, burnt Siena, ochre…), geometrical compositions, but these pictures were dominated by the almost uniformly blue sea, which took up the greater part of the overall composition. In the Gardanne pictures, Cézanne seemed to be looking up at the village from below, enabling him to render the full force of the structures of the houses clustered around the church tower.