Piper was no stranger to abstraction. Inspired by the Cubists, his highly Modernist paintings of the 1930s featured hard geometrical lines and blocks of pure colour. After the Second World War, Piper developed this with a more lyrical approach: integrating the landscapes he became so enamoured with as a series of spontaneous brushstrokes. Piper created several works on paper sketches like Untitled, relating to larger oils and collages of the north coast of France and Wales. It is thought that the present work is one of Piper’s initial ideas for the oil Cave and Rocks, Filmston (1962), exhibited at the artist’s solo exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art in 1963.