Hoyland is widely recognised as one of the greatest abstract artists of his time. Born in Sheffield in 1934, he trained at Sheffield College of Art from 1951–6 and the Royal Academy Schools from 1956–60. The impressive scale, vibrancy and expressive power that Hoyland achieved with his non-figurative paintings marked him out from his contemporaries and in 1967 he was the subject of a pivotal one-man exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery.

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Hoyland travelled to live and work in the United States in the late 1960s, where he was welcomed into the company of the New York artists. Though sharing their belief in using colour for its own sake, he did not embrace the American tendency towards minimalism and extreme simplification; instead, he built on the traditions of British and Northern European colouristic expressionism, opting for varied and textured surfaces that emphasized the tactile quality of the paint.