Lear left England in November 1864 to spend the winter in Nice, and at the end of November set off to walk to Genoa. Walking between sixteen and twenty miles a day, he returned to Nice on New Year's Eve. The trip was enormously productive for him: as he wrote to William Holman Hunt from the Promenade des Anglais on 7 January 1865, 'One of my aims this winter was to 'get' all the Corniche or Riviera di Ponente; .. that I have done both ways - with 145 sketches & better health than before - also less abdomen'. These sketches he 'penned out' in the evenings for his projected, but never realised, book (Vivien Noakes, ed., Edward Lear, Selected Letters, Oxford, 1988, pp. 202-3).
This impressive view of Villefranche was executed at the end of his stay in France; another drawing from the same viewpoint, dated 30 November 1864, was sold at Christie's, London, 5 June 2006, lot 63.