Steeped in the culture of Mitteleuropa, Hungarian-Jewish artist, musician and influential teacher George Mayer-Marton trained at the Art Academies of Vienna and Munich and was Vice-President of the progressive Vienna Hagenbund, before being forced to flee to England in 1938. The March of the Parents, painted in the wake of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution (also known as the Hungarian Uprising), reflects both the later conflict and the death of the artist's parents, following the liquidation of the Győr ghetto in 1945 (his mother was killed outright, his father was transported with 5,000 others before being murdered in Auschwitz, and his younger brother Vilmos died on a forced labour march).

Mayer-Marton's painting style blends elements of both Post-Impressionism, particularly Cubism, and Expressionism, executed in a typically colourful palette; however, he was also a skilful muralist and mosaicist and the complex, fractured picture surface perhaps relates also to the faceted tesserae of his mosaic technique.