This is the oil study for one of Michael Andrews most famous paintings, A Man Who Suddenly Fell Over, in the collection of the Tate Gallery.

The Tate's catalogue entry records the following:

In common with much of Andrews's work this picture is partly autobiographical. It was painted for his Diploma Examination shortly before leaving the Slade School of Art to face a period of uncertainty. He later commented that this painting was 'about the complete upsetting of someone's apparently secure equilibrium and about their most immediate efforts at recovery and their attempt to conceal that they have perhaps been badly hurt or upset'. This might explain why the man seems to grin instead of crying out in shock. The image of the body destablised in space was of interest to a number of artists in the 1950s, including Francis Bacon and Anthony Caro.