Derrick Greaves gained notoriety in the 1950s when he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale along with the 'Kitchen Sink' painters: John Bratby, Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith. By the mid sixties, he was re-evaluating his work and looking back to his early training as a sign-writer: 'Greaves was painting more and more flatly, so that he could measure more precisely the relationships between forms ... Greaves had succeeded in rejuvenating his work, pulling it apart and reconstructing its vocabulary and syntax, and the late 1960s and early 1970s would witness some of his most powerful works' (J. Hyman Derrick Greaves from Kitchen Sink to Shangri-La, Aldershot, 2007, p. 95).
The present work was probably intended to be framed as a diptych. Hyman comments on these works, 'The use of diptychs and triptychs in paintings of the later 1960s and early 1970s allowed Greaves to suggest the passage of time between one image and the next, or combine incidents in different places bought together for contemplation ... the effect of this attempt to address a subject from different angles, literally and metaphorically, added a more complex literary and narrative element to the static medium of painting' (op.cit, p. 103).