Carlos Botelho (1899-1982) held his first solo exhibition in 1932, at the Bobone Salon in Lisbon. His first trips to Paris would prove decisive in his artistic development. Van Gogh - like later Ensor, Cézanne and Matisse - became a key reference for painting his preferred themes.

If at the beginning of his career Lisbon was one iconography among others in his production, throughout the 1930s it became predominant. The fact that he lived and worked in Costa do Castelo until 1949 was decisive in the chosen cityscapes. His international references thus intersect with his model. As Botelho states, "Van Gogh and the Costa do Castelo where I went to live (...) here are my 'revealers'. One gave me the secret of colours and shapes, the other gave me the model. I started to paint "my" Lisbon.”

In this oil there is a softening of the initial expressionist vehemence at the level of colours, here harmony is achieved in a consonant palette of pinks and ochres. But the taste for the materiality of the surfaces is maintained, with a discreet use of strategies of compositional dramatisation. The perspective, chosen to paint the - Páteo de D. Fradique "de Baix "
, dramatises the diagonals of the cobbled pavement and the side wall leading to the vaulted passageway, the vanishing point of the composition. The vertical materiality of the façades, animated by the decomposition of their plaster, by the irregularity of their openings and by traces of their daily life (such as clothes drying), contrasts with and is enlivened by forms of another order: the organicity that rises from the tree trunks and branches, the suggestion of life in the street with the figures wearing aprons, chatting or carrying baskets on their heads.