Cézanne exhibited this strange and haunting picture at the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877. With it, he demonstrated his allegiance to Impressionism's subject matter and style while rejecting its primary tenet: painting directly from the model and out of doors. He alludes to famous paintings by Courbet and Manet of the 1860s but uses a technique closer to that of Pissarro and Renoir in the 1870s. At the same time, Cézanne harks back to eighteenth-century fêtes champêtres by Watteau as well as to their source in Renaissance pastorals by Venetian artists such as Giorgione. These many allusions reinforce the artificial, dreamlike mood of the picture. As a critic wrote in 1877, "the scene is vast and sublime like a memory."

The work was first owned by Cézanne's earliest, and most devoted, patron, Victor Chocquet. In 1907 Hugo von Tschudi tried but failed to obtain it for the Nationalgalerie in Berlin; the painter Max Liebermann (1847–1935) bought it instead. Liebermann crowed to a friend, "You see, [I] squander what little hard-earned money I have. The picture may be too much decoration and not quite enough nature, almost Venetian, but it is charming and kills everything else." The Museum was able to acquire this important canvas thanks to the generosity of Liebermann's great-granddaughters, in addition to that of several friends of the department.