The sitter in this etching is the art historian Michael Podro (Michael Isaac Podrushnik), born to Jewish immigrant parents in Golders Green, London in 1931. His father, Joshua Podrushnik, later Podro (1893/4–1962), who was from White Russia, ran a press cuttings agency; his mother Fanny (née Klinghoffer) was born in Polish Galica and was the older sister of the artist Clara Klinghoffer (for whom she often sat). After reading English at Jesus College, Cambridge, Podro became a part-time student at the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 1955 intending to become a painter but changed direction after becoming inspired by the lectures of art historian E. H. Gombrich, who went on to supervise Podro's PhD on Konrad Fiedler at the Warburg Institute, together with Richard Wollheim at University College London. In 1961 Podro was appointed Head of Art History at Camberwell School of Art, where he befriended Frank Auerbach and R. B. Kitaj, going on to become lecturer in the philosophy of art at the Warburg Institute in 1967. In 1969 he was appointed reader of art history at the University of Essex and professor in 1973; he was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1992 and appointed CBE in 2001.

Podro first wrote about Auerbach’s work in 1969. Later, reviewing the artist’s 2001 Royal Academy retrospective, he observed: ‘Auerbach’s work has a constantly self-revising dynamic which never allows the subject to disengage from the distinctive properties of the painter’s medium’.

This print is part of a series of etchings of friends and family entitled Seven Portraits, drawn by the artist with a Japanese screwdriver bought from his local Woolworth's, then proofed and printed by Marc Balakjian (1938-2017), the Lebanese born artist and printmaker of Armenian descent, at Studio Prints They were made to accompany the deluxe edition of Robert Hughes’ Frank Auerbach monograph in 1990.