[3] The painting prompted art critic Henri Matisse to mock it as being composed of cubes which led to the name of the movement.

Louis Vauxcelles recounted how Henri Matisse told him at the time, "Braque has just sent in [to the 1908 Salon d'Automne] a painting made of little cubes".

The motif of the viaduct at l'Estaque had inspired Braque to produce three paintings marked by the simplification of form and deconstruction of perspective.

Following the rejection of Braque's paintings, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler offered the artist a one-person show at his gallery on a small street situated behind La Madeleine, Paris.

It was Vauxcelles who called Braque a daring man who despises form, "reducing everything, places and a figures and houses, to geometric schemas, to cubes".