Robert Medley, who owned this and the following sketch, was a painter and stage designer who joined the staff of Chelsea School of Art in 1932 to teach life drawing and painting. Medley designed the sets for W.H. Auden's first play, The Dance of Death, performed by the Group Theatre, and it was through him that Moore was asked to design the mask. The play was a considerable success when it was first performed in London in 1934. Moore and Auden, fellow Yorkshiremen, stayed in touch, and some forty years later Moore was working on a series of lithographs to accompany poems by Auden when the poet died near Vienna, where the two had met only ten days earlier.