"Both Matisse and Louis Vauxcelles, the critic who had unwittingly given the Fauves their name, referred to Braque's work of the time and to this painting in particular as being composed of cubes - remarks that were destined to name the Cubist movement for history. Yet their observation was only partially right. For all the seeming solidity of this new world of building blocks, there is something strangely unstable and shifting in its appearance. The ostensible cubes of Houses at L'Estaque were to evolve into a pictorial language that rapidly discard this preliminary reference to solid geometry and turned rather to a further exploration of an ever more ambiguous and fluctuating world."  - Robert Rosenblum, Cubism and 20th Century Art (1960)