Celia Paul (b. 1959, India) is a renowned and original figurative painter who also works with print. Her paintings and prints are intimate portraits of people (or places) she knows well. Her mother features regularly as a sitter. This image, with her mother seated centre stage, includes a self-portrait of the artist, seen at a doorway in the background, peering tentatively from behind her mother as if she were incidental to the scene. As usual, Paul has worked with the printer Marc Balakjian using soft-ground etching to give a blurry muted quality to the printed image, capturing qualities more akin to watercolour than to etching.

This plate is one of several which have been donated to the V&A through the good offices of the printer, Mark Balakjian and his partner at Studio Prints, Dorothea Wight. The plate has been cancelled unobtrusively, by the addition of the artist's initials, lower left, rather than by scoring through the image.