In 1927, Dorrit Black travelled to London, where she enrolled at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art and began exploring the medium of linocut with guidance from the innovative English printmaker Claude Flight. She immediately appreciated both the process and Flight’s futuristic style, and the experience became an important influence on her practice.

On a subsequent trip to England in the summer of 1934, Black joined Flight and a group of his students on a sketching trip to Worth Matravers on the Dorset coast, in the south of England. A visit to nearby Chapman’s Pool provided the inspiration for this linocut. Black has employed a limited palette to compose a striking, modern landscape that gestures towards abstraction. The cubist style references the work of the French artist André Lhote, with whom Black had also studied. Significantly, fellow Australian artist Thea Proctor chose to reproduce Chapman’s Pool 1935 in her article ‘Modern art in Sydney’, which was published in Art in Australia in November 1938 and devoted to ‘new trends in Australian art’.