Born in the Provençal town of Grasse in 1820, Nègre moved to Paris at nineteen to study painting in the studio of Paul Delaroche and arrived in the capital just a few months after the public announcement of the invention of photography. He began making daguerreotypes in the mid-1840s, but only with the ascendancy of paper negatives and prints around 1850 did he fully embrace photography, first as an aid to his painting and later as documentation and art.

After a photographic excursion to the south of France in August 1852, when this picture was made, Nègre wrote: "Being a painter myself, I have kept painters in mind. Wherever I could dispense with architectural precision I have indulged in the picturesque; in which case I have sacrificed a few details, when necessary, in favor of an imposing effect . . . [and] poetic charm." This photograph of a street in Nègre's hometown combines the broad patches of light and dark characteristic of early paper-negative photographs with a rigorously geometric structure; the whole composition is enlivened by carefully placed details, such as the young man seated on the hillside—somewhat improbably—as if leaning against the left edge of the picture.