Wilhelmina Barns-Graham visited Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland in the summer of 1948 with the Brotherton family, her friends from St Ives, Cornwall, where she lived. She climbed it several times and the experience had a profound effect on her and her artistic output. She also recalled it vividly 20, and again 50 years later, in an interview of 1998. In this work she employs a ‘scratch and scrape’ technique capturing the monumental shape of the glacier, its light, and the contrast between solidity and glass-like transparency. Her art also combined natural subjects with the influence of older abstract artists Ben Nicholson (1894-1982) and Naum Gabo. It was purchased at her exhibition at The Redfern Gallery by Dr Harold Paine Widdup (1899-1962) who bequeathed his somewhat avant-garde collection of over 300 works to the Contemporary Art Society.