During his first visit, Picasso had experienced a new sense of freedom, set apart from the artistic restrictions of his father, José Ruiz y Blasco and La Academía de Bellas Artes.

The image depicts a factory which was an unusual subject for the period, as it departed from the typical 19th century landscapes of distant smokestacks.

In this painting Picasso reduced the factory and its chimney to rough geometric shapes, simplifying the forms to almost unrecognisable objects.

The volumes of the structure are deliberately sketchy, presented using grey and orange planes, rather than realistic external facades.

[1] In his book, Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo, Christopher Green remarked that the factory and palm trees depicted in the painting almost certainly did not exist in real life.

John Richardson suggested that the palm trees in the painting may have been a series of olive presses known by locals as "the factory".

[6] Jonathan Jones of The Guardian called the work "formidable"[7] and viewed the painting as "an experiment in how brutally you can reduce, simplify, solidify and abstract forms and still produce a picture that is not simply recognisable, but profoundly full of life.