Born in Lodz in Poland of Jewish parentage, Adler came to Scotland with the Polish Army in 1940 and it was there, after his discharge a year later, he settled to live and work briefly as a painter before moving to London for the last 5 years of his life. In both places his sophisticated, first-hand knowledge and understanding of German Expressionism (he had been a close working colleague of Paul Klee’s in Dusseldorf) and French Cubism (in Paris in the 30s) had a profound impact on a younger war-time generation of British painters cut off, as they had been for sometime, from contemporary European art. With its richly glowing colours and vigorous calligraphic drawing this watercolour (dating from the period when he first started showing in London) is highly characteristic of an artist whose style can be seen as lying somewhere between Picasso and Klee - 'A very good place to stand' was how he answered critics who accused him of being too derivative of them. And now, after being largely neglected since his early death in 1949, it is possible to see, in a work like this, how Adler did indeed succeed in forging something personal and distinctive out of such inspiring influences, one which was able, in the words of Paul Fierens 'to express anxiety, physical and spiritual anguish in the most solid and stable construction; to bring life into abstraction, an abstraction infused with eloquence, with the convincing strength of tangible reality, of things seen.'