"Youth Mourning is a return to his early style of painting. The painting is a response to the horrors of the First World War and, in particular, the death of Clausen’s own daughter’s fiancÃ�. He uses the nakedness of the figure and the starkness of the barren landscape to emphasise the grief and emptiness of death." image: A naked young woman, personifying Youth, kneels in a grief-stricken attitude before a wooden cross marking a grave. In the distance are the flooded craters of a battlefield.