Francesco Clemente (born 1952) is one of a group of Italian artists who emerged in the late 1970s as part of a European-wide revival of Neo-Expressionist figurative painting, but Clemente was also much influenced by historical Italian painting and by the art of India, a country where he has spent much of his life. His watercolour drawings have an exceptional luminosity. In this print he and his Japanese printers created a paradoxical, virtuoso piece of work that looks exactly like a watercolour but is in fact a woodcut. It was printed from dozens of limewood blocks using 14 transparent pigments printed in 49 stages for each impression.