Morrocco was born in Aberdeen in 1917 of immigrant Italian parents. He studied at Gray's School of Art, Aberdeen where he was a pupil of James Cowie and Robert Sivell, and was himself to become head of painting at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee.
His Italian origins and regular trips to Italy since the 1950s have influenced his use of colour and subject matter. Morrocco comments on his choice of the female figure in his works: 'I naturally have evolved a type which is heavy built - a female form which is fulsome - and the reason for that is not simply because you see them all the time abroad, but because they fill the space: you get a fulsome coloured shape of a certain bulk on the canvas - it actually gives a lot to work with ... Picasso makes things heavy - he makes hands big and he makes legs thick. I started to see this in actual reality in peasant women in Italy. My mother was built like that a little bit. Every so often I have noticed in the figures that there is a kind of echo of my mother. So it's a mixture of two things - it is a mixture of an aesthetic use of a bulky shape as well as actually being a sympathetic female form' (V. Keller and C. Clark, Alberto Morrocco, Touring Exhibition Catalogue, Edinburgh, 1993, p. 50).