Carpenter's son Esaias Thorén (1901-1981) got the kick of his young life when he saw GAN's rainbow-hued airplane painting Sparmann's Flight in a bookstore window in Halmstad in July 1919. Thorén, then just 17 years old, decided on the spot to become an artist and later began working in his father's carpentry workshop to save money for his art education. His father, Theodor Thorén, was a versatile carpenter, writer, and musician who taught his children to play various instruments. The son's first name came from his father Thorén's great admiration for Esaias Tegnér, which quickly mutated into the nickname "Isse" among friends. Through a newspaper advertisement, "Isse" came into contact with the young Sven Jonson, who was a professional painter but also had artistic ambitions. The two teamed up and, along with a third artist, formed the small group "The Young," which in 1924 took lessons from Axel Olson. In the autumn of 1925, Thorén and Jonson studied at Wilhelmson's painting school in Stockholm, and the following autumn, the two companions - who had previously earned some money through decorative wall painting in Halmstad - set off on a four-month study trip to Paris.

In Paris, Jonson and Thorén studied figure drawing at Maison Watteau and older European painting at the Louvre. Egon Östlund writes in his chronicle about the Halmstad group that of the contemporary art, it was "the Russian artist couple Grabowski and Grabowska" that remained in memory. Stanislas Grabowski (1901-1957) was a Polish artist who had met the young Russian Nadja Khodossievitj (1904-1983) in Warsaw, a former student of Malevich, and married her in 1923, when she became madame Grabowska. In 1924, the young Polish-Russian couple moved to Paris, where Nadja became a student of Fernand Léger at the Académie Moderne (and many years later, in 1952, married her former teacher). When Jonson and Thorén were in Paris during the winter of 1926-27, the Grabowski couple indeed exhibited at a gallery in Montparnasse, and their cubist and suprematist painting evidently made a strong impression on the two young painters from Halmstad.