During the early 1930s, Wadsworth painted in an abstract style, but moved away from the hard, aggressive forms of his earlier vorticist period to naturalistically-inspired shapes. The rounded forms in this painting seem biological in inspiration. For many modern artists, scientific discoveries of a microscopic, biological nature were as stimulating and as suggestive of modernity as new developments in machinery or industry. Wadsworth was in close contact with developments in the French avant-garde, travelling to France regularly and exhibiting there. On the Continent he was recognised, in the early 1930s, as probably Britain's leading abstract artist.