Ethel Spowers was one of a number of privileged Australian women artists whose travels abroad gave her access to the modernist art forms of the early twentieth century. By the time she reached her 30s, Spowers had studied successively at the Académie Delecluse, Paris, the National Gallery School, Melbourne, the Regent Street Polytechnic, London, and the Académie Ranson, also in Paris. Her early work in drawing, watercolour and linocuts, produced in Melbourne in the mid-1920s, was illustrative, inspired by children's fairy tales. When she returned to Europe in 1929, she came under the tutelage of the leading exponent of the modernist linocut, Claude Flight, at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London. Spowers's close friend and fellow student at the School, Eveline Syme, wrote of Flight in The recorder, a publication of the Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria, in 1929:

 

Spowers's work began to attract critical attention in the 1930s and the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum acquired a number of her prints at this time. She was a founding member of George Bell's Contemporary Group in Melbourne and kept a studio above the stables of her family home, Toorak House. By the end of the decade, however, she was forced to give up her artistic practice due to ill health and eventually succumbed to cancer at the age of 57 in 1947.

 

The simple medium of the linocut is eloquently employed in this early work by Ethel Spowers, Staircase window. The few fine lines cut into the block are enough to suggest the volume of the staircase and the light reflected off the polished wooden balustrade. The youthful presence of the figure caught in silhouette against the window throws into relief the grandeur of the space. There is a sense that this print could illustrate a children's story but its presence — the contrast of its density and light — is strong enough for the work to stand alone. While the subject is not inherently modern, there is a formal tension between positive and negative values and an economy of style which prefigures Spowers's later work inspired by Claude Flight. Her cutting away of the block both creates the negative space in the tracery of the lead lighting and also becomes the drawn line in the rest of the composition. The girl's head in silhouette is the counterweight to the finial, which catches the light.