These paintings are a fusion of holiday brochure swimming pools and renaissance landscape paintings. They are all painted on gold supports, suggesting panels from altarpieces that might be seen on a Tuscan holiday.

The pool pictures in brochures are always very deep blue and have dramatic perspectives. The paintings represent a middle class fantasy that combines exclusive Italian villas within easy reach of cultural centres such as Siena or Arezzo. (Summers Lease 1988 John Mortimer)

The paintings also make reference to the type of landscape that is often depicted through windows or behind a religious subject in renaissance paintings.

The landscapes used by artists of this period are a strange mix of observation and generic forms. The landscape is often depicted as a well ordered, productive and controlled space. The notion of landscape as a fantasy, as an escape is already there in these early paintings (an escape from the city). This fantasy can be seen in literature of the period such as the Decameron by Boccaccio (1351).