Holzhandler’s Jewish family huddles together in a tight family unit, their warmth and intimacy contrasting with the cold, barren, snow-covered landscape behind them. The family is a common source of inspiration for the artist, who spent her first six years with a Catholic family in Normandy after the collapse of her father’s business. Born in Paris in 1928, Holzhandler is the daughter of Jewish-Polish émigrés. In 1934 she was reunited with her immediate family and moved to England. Much of her extended family, who remained behind, later perished in Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Holzhandler returned to Paris in 1946 to attend the Sorbonne, re-settling in England in 1948. She studied at the Anglo-French Art Centre in St John’s Wood, London, where she met and married a fellow student, George Swinford, and settled in Hampstead.