British artist and sculptor Henry Moore designed this print for the textile firm Ascher Limited, founded by Zika and Lida Ascher, Czech émigrés who moved to London in 1939. Along with other British and European artists, Moore was asked by Ascher to design prints for dress fabrics in order to create more exciting textiles than those that had been available during the Second World War.

Moore completed several variations on this pattern of rectangles. On close inspection the rectangles or 'trains' are an elaborate array of eighteen different ideas. Some of the rectangles are truncated into squares, while others are abbreviated, to create further variations. The general effect echoes that of Moore's drawings a decade earlier, where rows of rectangles containing linear designs touch on the fluid forms of the Surrealists and the hard-edged linear motifs of the Constructivists.