Grace Crowley was one of the first Australian artists to respond to Cubism. In Paris in the late 1920s, she studied alongside Dorrit Black and Anne Dangar under French Cubist artists André Lhote and Albert Gleizes. In 1928 Crowley travelled to Lhote’s summer school in the South of France, held in the small medieval village of Mirmande in the Drôme valley. The composition of Girl with goats is based upon the proportions of the golden mean and shows the geometric simplification of form that was taught by Lhote. Crowley returned to Australia in 1930 and became a leader of the modernist movement in Sydney.