As a result of a journey to Italy, Cross produced a number of such scenes of Perugia and Assisi.
Pointillism - the technique used to produce this work - is a method of painting in which the colour is applied in small dots of paint, the artist breaking complex tones up into pure colours which are then combined by the eye at a distance. The style is often described as Divisionism or Neo-Impressionism. The Impressionists had an empirical attitude to nature, while the Neo-Impressionists created their own methods on the basis of scientific theories of light and colour.
Here, the "chance" nature of Impressionist compositions was replaced by a precisely enclosed construction, and Impressionist spontaneity by the scrupulously methodical application of identical brushstrokes to the canvas, creating the effect of a decorative coloured mosaic.