Although landscape has played a major role in his painting, this is one of only two landscape prints in Auerbach’s oeuvre. The subject is a tree in Herefordshire - seen from above out of an upstairs window. First Auerbach tried to etch the plate at the printers from his drawings but this didn’t work so he eventually took the plates with him to the country and etched the scene from life in situ. A chalk, charcoal and gouache of the same subject is in the permanent collection of National Galleries Scotland.

‘Avoiding any formula for trees, he caught the amorphous instability of the vast masses of foliage, seen from a position which masked their supporting anatomy, with a series of broad, swaying, multivalent shapes, marked out in screenprinted lines across the finer grained etching’ - Michael Podro, 1990.