This is one of a group of 143 state, trial and cancellation proofs of etchings by Lucian Freud (1922-2011) which came from the collection of Marc Balakjian (1938-2017) of Studio Prints. Balakjian was Freud’s printer from 1985 and worked closely with him on the production of his etchings.

This print was inspired by a painting by John Constable, Study of the Trunk of an Elm Tree, c.1821, in the collection of the V&A, which Freud saw when he was a student aged about 17. He tried and failed to copy it at the time, and also failed in his efforts to paint a treek trunk from nature. In 2002 Freud was invited to select works for a Constable exhibition (Constable: Le Choix de Lucian Freud) at the Grand Palais, Paris. A conversation about Constable between Freud and the critic William Feaver was published in French in the exhibition catalogue; at the suggestion of the British Council this was replublished in English as a separate book, 'Lucian Freud on John Constable - A Conversation with William Feaver' (2003). He agreed to make this etching to help pay for the publication of the book.

He did not work from the original, as he had done when making paintings and etching after Chardin's The Young Schoolmistress. He used a large postcard of the picture as his source instead. The etching is almost exactly the same size as the painting, but Freud made several changes to the composition. He cropped it on all sides and magnified the central area. He also moved the blackbird, which would have been lost in the cropping, closer to the tree trunk. The trial proofs show that Balakjian experimented with different inks - green-black and black. Freud approved the green-black proofs and asked Balakjian to keep the trunk dark and lighten the branches. In the published edition (see E.1063-2003) achieved this effect by inking the body of the trunk with black ink, adding dark tone to its sides, and using a green-black for the rest of the tree and the surrounding landscape.