The painting is the image of five men riding on the beach, one group of three men is riding towards the sea and the other two riders are galloping from the left. The two men riding along the beach are in hooded jackets and have no faces or are wearing masks to hide their faces. The colour of their horses is also different from the other horses in the image. Instead of using the realistic colours of such an environment, the artist used pink for the ground. One can clearly spot the artist's signature at the bottom left corner of the painting.

The painting style used in this artwork is cloisonnism. Cloisonnism style involved painting with bold and flat forms separated by dark contours. The style is associated with the pont-aven artist colony in Brittany. Some of the members of the colony include Jacob Meyer de Haan, Charles Laval, Charles Filiger, Paul Serusier and Armand Seguin. The style is similar to Synthetism, but Synthesist painters did not use the thick black outlines used in cloisonnism. Gauguin's legal guardian, Gustave Arosa, is believed to have influenced his attitudes toward art. Gustave had a wide collection of impressionist artists like Jean-Francois Millet, Camille Corot and Eugene Delacroix. Even though he started painting when he was a stockbroker, Gauguin developed a full interest in art when he attended his first Impressionist exhibition in 1874.

The artist's newfound love for art made him quit his stockbroker job, and he became an art collector before he fully dedicated his life to art. He was first mentored by Pissarro, who later introduced him to Cezanne, and the three worked together for some time. Though Gauguin first associated himself with Impressionism, he later broke away to pioneer a new art style known as Symbolism. When Gauguin moved to Pont-Aven after abandoning his family, he met artists Charles Laval and Emile Bernard. Together with these artists, Gauguin forged a new style known as Synthetism. The style was a response to Impressionism's limits as it expressed an interior state instead of just the surface appearance. Another fellow artist who influenced Gauguin's art style is Vincent Van Gogh. Gauguin met Van Gogh when they worked together for one summer in the South of France. When he moved to Hiva-Oa, his style was largely influenced by the Polynesian culture.