The same year this work was painted, 1951, the British Arts Council invited Wells to exhibit in the San Paulo Biennial in the Festival of Britain. Later that year, Wells entered the American stage as one of only five St Ives artists invited to submit works to the 15th Annual Artists International Association Abstract Art exhibition in New York (the first time a British section had been included in the New York show the first significant showing of British Abstract painting in the USA). At this show Wells’ work hung alongside those of Hepworth, Nicholson, Lanyon, Frost and Barns-Graham and also Rothko, de Kooning and Motherwell. Wells' introduction to the American market met with significant success and there followed one-man shows in the Durlacher Gallery in New York in 1952, 1958 and 1960. In 1958 the International Association of Art Critics awarded him the Critics’ Prize for ‘Vista’ (1955); one of the artist’s powerful Cornish landscape-inspired works of the mid-50s.

At this point in his career, Wells was interested in evoking a sense of movement over and in fact, through the rugged landscape of Cornwall, capturing in his tonal harmonies and structures the granite cliffs, geographical structures and minerals of the land. As Martin Rowe observes “These (landscapes of the 1950s) are products of Wells’ immense knowledge of his surroundings and their forms gained over time … However, they combine this with an interest in formal geometrical structure, subtle colour harmonies, a distilled study of natural forms and a painstaking technique to create a complex but ordered, constructed landscape”.