Unlike many painters, Morris often painted straight onto the canvas without making preparatory sketches beforehand. Although this painting was originally part of a larger group portrait, it nevertheless stands in its own right as a quietly beautiful and powerful portrait of a pensive young man.

Sir Cedric Morris was born in Swansea in 1889 and inherited his father's baronetcy in 1947. He turned to painting shortly before the First World War, and was largely self-taught. With his life-long companion, the painter Arthur Lett Haines, he established the East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting, whose students included Lucian Freud. Morris exhibited with the Seven and Five Society from 1926 to 1932, but withdrew when his own preference for figurative painting began to diverge from the Society's emphasis on abstraction. During the Depression in the 1930s he worked with communities in his native South Wales to establish art societies. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Tate Gallery in 1984.