Together with his close friend Pablo Picasso, Braque originated Cubism and the Cubist style. Impressed by an exhibition of Fauve paintings in 1905, he adopted Fauvism before shifting to a style similar to Cézanne's by 1908. From 1908 to 1913 he conducted an intense study of the effects of light and perspective and learned the technical means to represent these effects. In village scenes, he frequently reduced architectural structures to a shaded cube or other geometric form so that volume seemed to be contradicted, which made the object look both flat and three-dimensional. The subtle emotion he attached to everyday objects, which he put in highly structured compositions, led him to be revered in his lifetime as the quintessential French artist.

The son of a house painter, Braque was born in Argenteuil-sur-Seine and settled in Paris in 1902 to pursue painting as a fine art. He began to work closely with Picasso in 1909, and both artists produced paintings of neutralized color and complex, faceted forms now called Analytic Cubism. He enlisted in the French Army in 1914 but was severely wounded and after World War I resumed his career alone. He moved to the Normandy coast and developed a more personal style characterized by brilliant color and textured surfaces, and the reappearance of the human figure.