Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) studied at the Slade School of Art in London between 1898 and 1901. He was one of the first British artists to incorporate elements from the Continental movements Cubism and Expressionism into his work, having spent the years 1902-1908 travelling Europe and studying in museums. Lewis developed his own distinctive style, which was characterised by linear and formal distortion but underpinned by the sure draughtsmanship he had learned at the Slade. By around 1913 Lewis was generally acknowledged to be Britain's leading avant-garde artist. He went on to base his art on mechanistic and geometrical forms, a style which he termed Vorticism.

Sunset among the Michelangelos appears to express Lewis's vehement rejection of the traditional view that the Italian High Renaissance represented the highest point of artistic achievement. In his highly provocative publication BLAST, first published in 1914, Lewis explicitly criticised Michelangelo's pervasive influence: 'Michelangelo is probably the worst spook in Europe, and haunts English art without respite'; elsewhere he wrote: 'Michelangelo is my Bete-Noir'. In this watercolour, distorted figures or sculptures with a Michelangelesque muscularity appear to melt and disintegrate on rocks against a vivid sky.