In late 1929, at the age of eighteen, the Swiss born Lill Tschudi moved to London to enroll at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art. Her spell there was short, lasting little more than six months, however she was tenacious in her studies and prolific in her output, producing over 350 linocuts during her lifetime. She studied linocutting under Claude Flight, who had run the school with Iain Macnab since 1925. Flight’s formal and abstract visual language was an important influence on Tschudi’s printing practice, which she had first seen in the work of the Austrian born Norbertine Bresslern-Roth, whose energetic studies of animals in motion had a clear impact on her own work.

Like Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power, her contemporaries at the Grosvenor, Tschudi’s lino cuts typically depict vibrant scenes of sporting events, busy London street scenes, circuses and gymnasts. These works capture the dynamism and movement that is associated with the Vorticists. Although the Vorticist movement had grown in Britain during the interwar period, it had by that point diffused its more radical doctrinal approach to modern art, owing to the First World War, but its aesthetic influences were still largely appreciated well into the 1930s. Tschudi left for Paris after leaving the school, but maintained a constant connection with Britain throughout her life, exhibiting and selling most of her work with the help of Flight, who remained her close friend throughout.