Wrestlers is one of a series of small panels Vaughan painted on the theme of wrestling figures. He worked on the set of four oil paintings in a frenzy of creativity, even though his mental and physical health was poor. On the reverse of the panel he recorded the date he completed the painting as April 2, 1964. His journal entry for that particular day reads:
"Manic work drive today (& yesterday). 4 new 17 x 16, painted wet in wet, when every touch you make seems marvelous & exhilarating you feel at last – this is it – this is the way you should paint. But then, 3 hours later the results are no different. Very exhausting this constantly not knowing what you are doing. Not having any real aim or purpose – just trying to surprise yourself with a masterpiece. The wretched tension in my head continues, giving the feeling I am about to go mad & break down or something."
The paint is freely and expressively handled whereby the pigment is employed as an equivalent of flesh rather than an agent to merely describe appearance. There is little interest in colour since the mostly monochromatic image concentrates on the expression of interlocked human forms. The two combatants are tangled together in combat and seem to fuse into a single form. In the absence of a model it is known that Vaughan looked at the work of Eadweard Muybridge who photographed several pairs of wrestlers in the late 1870s.