Copperplate engraving. Posthumous edition of only 20 prints from a cancelled plate.

Edition on craft paper 25cm x 33cm

Italian peasants frequently took their siesta’s, or passed entire nights, sleeping in the open fields.

Austin’s early plates show an extraordinary sweetness of line and often, as in his large plates of deer, beautifully unified compositions.  There is in the best sense an academic quality about these, very proper in a man who was virtually a pioneer in his his art today.  About 1929 a close study of the German masters of engraving is evident.  But Austin has passed through his probationary stage and is master not only of his technique, in which no English engraver has surpassed him, but also in using his medium in a native, personal way. Already Mr Dodgson had noticed in his work “an aftermath of Pre-Raphaelitism…with its harking back to the past and its wealth of realistic detail.”