Gordon Onslow-Ford was born in Wendover, England and spent ten years as an officer in the Royal Navy before moving to Paris in 1936, where he briefly studied with Léger and Lhote. In 1937 he met Matta (Roberto Echaurren) shortly after the Chilean artist made his first drawings. These so impressed Onslow-Ford that he began to work in a similar style; both men were the last artists to join the Surrealists before the outbreak of World War II. In 1939 Onslow-Ford contributed to Surrealist techniques by inventing coulage, in which liquid paint is poured on the canvas and stirred, allowing organic shapes to emerge from the drying puddles. To organize these formless shapes he would typically superimpose a grid. This practice, and the strong influence of Matta's biomorphic shapes, can be observed in the composition offered here.

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