Robert Austin, printmaker

This engraving is one of many images Robert Austin made of men and women praying. He would have witnessed similar religious practice during his travels in Italy in the 1920s. Like the 15th-century artist Martin Schongauer—whom he admired, and on whose monogram he modeled his own—Austin used a system of outlines, dots, and crosshatching, but here the effect is quite different. The decorative quality of Schongauer’s print is completely absent in Austin’s brooding, more three-dimensional image. The woman depicted here seems to inhabit a convincing physical space as well as a state of mind.