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.

The etching is barely visible on the printing plate but the resultant print shows how much ink is held even by a shallowly etched plate. Soft ground includes tallow, which keeps it from drying, allowing the artist to create a soft line resembling pencil by drawing into the etching ground through an intermediary layer of a sheet of paper, which, when pulled away from the plate, also removes some of the ground.

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 V&A also has the plate for this print (see E.17-2009).