Ayrton emerged onto the art scene as something of a prodigy. At the age of 20 he was commissioned to design sets for a production of Macbeth directed by John Gielgud, at 21, the year of the present work, he was teaching at The Camberwell College of Art (growing a beard to lend himself gravitas). He had his first solo exhibition aged 22 and the following year was appointed art critic of The Spectator and recruited for the Home Service’s Brains Trust.

Ayrton was obsessed with the story of St Anthony, a Saint tormented with demonic visions ‘’drawn to work out my own version of the subject in relation to my own life and the world as I felt it to be.’’ Throughout the first half of the 1940’s he worked on the theme in a variety of media, and on this apparently one-off occasion incised slate. The features of the saint are his own, charged with the spirituality of the German Artists Ayrton admired on student sketching trips to the Albertina such as Durer and Grünewald.
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Ayrton’s large painting of St Anthony, the masterpiece of his war -time period was acquired by The Tate in 1983.