Self-Portrait holding Phillippe Aries’ ‘In The Hour of Our Death’.

Here, the artist is holding one of the influential texts which inspired his 1982 Project on the theme of Death and his essay on the contemporary "death industry" The Changing Pattern of Dying (1981). The picture relates to a number of late works on the theme of Time, and the book's title - In The Hour of Our Death - suggest this painting is a memento mori.