Brant photographed celebrities throughout his career, often on assignment for publications like Picture Post, Lilliput, and Harpar’s Bazaar. The majority of his subjects were artists, writers, critics, and other intellectual and cultural figures whom he admired. His early portraits often placed the figure off-center and alongside another object or compositional element that competed for visual dominance, such as the portrait-within-portrait of the critic and poet William Empson.

Brandt employed a wide variety of finishing techniques on his prints, often moving beyond simple retouching to enhance specific areas of the image, augmenting detail by adding graphite, ink, or washes, or strengthening line through scoring or scratching the surface of the print. This photograph, however, includes a rather unusual addition: Brandt has penciled in the absent body in the portrait on the wall behind Empson.