Cezanne treated the rocks in this composition much as he did the fruits in his still lifes, rendering the shapes with passages of subtly varied color. Green, blue, and purple tints, with an accent of golden sunlight at center, impart a shimmering vibrancy to the stones. The sense of delicacy is enhanced by the thin, watercolor-like application of pigment, typical of Cezanne's oils in the mid-1890s. Scholars traditionally identified the setting as the forest of Fontainebleau, where the artist worked around 1894, but it has also been suggested that the site is near Aix-en-Provence.