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Lot Essay
A joyful effusion of colour, texture and form, Study of Primrose Hill (1973-1974) is a dynamic painting of one of Frank Auerbach’s most beloved landscape subjects. Profoundly attached to his North London environment, Auerbach grew to know Primrose Hill—a mile’s walk from his studio in Camden—across decades of work, depicting the park’s living scenery with the same intensity, attention and intimacy that he brought to his human sitters. Here, energetic brushwork mounts up the hill’s swell in rich golden impasto, with a zigzagged jolt of green in the foreground. Deep red angles set out a receding path and overhanging trees. Masses of foliage are conveyed in ultramarine and leafy green: the sky is radiant in marbled, scraped-back layers of paler blue that shimmer like mother-of-pearl. Paint drips in tendrils and is pressed into broad streaks of variegated colour. One of the park’s distinctive lamp-posts sits like a beacon at the heart of the painting, which plunges inward with a sweeping sense of pictorial space. In 1978, it was shown in Auerbach’s major Arts Council retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London and the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh.
Auerbach moved to his Camden studio—previously occupied by his friend Leon Kossoff—in 1954, and painted Primrose Hill for the first time that year. That work’s earth-coloured, thickly encrusted surface corresponds to the central London ruins and building sites he was depicting in the same period. His methods were informed by his teacher David Bomberg, who sought to capture what he called ‘the spirit in the mass’ through repeated encounters with a subject. Fresh colours were introduced as Auerbach became able to afford them, and his treatment of the landscape gradually brightened and opened up, with a greater role given to skies, sunlight and windblown trees. He made daring forays into abstracted, angular colour and form in a trio of works from the late 1960s—including the Tate’s Primrose Hill (1967-1968)—which are developed further in the present work’s vibrant yellows, blues and greens. In total, Auerbach made some forty pictures of Primrose Hill. Thirteen are now held in museum collections, including Tate, London, the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.
When working on a Primrose Hill painting, Auerbach would begin each morning with a sketch made in-situ, ‘so as to have an impulse, an idea, a new fact, a newly discovered structure, to work from’ (letter to P. Marcus, 16 March 1972, Tate archive). He returned to the studio and pinned up older and newer drawings alongside the painting. They allowed him, he said, to recollect ‘what it was like to actually draw there that morning … I see the sunlight and the trees and the hill so I paint from these by looking at the drawing. In fact, like many people at the end of the painting, I’m looking at black and white drawings and the lines signal colours to me’ (quoted in C. Lampert, ‘Frank Auerbach’, in Frank Auerbach, exh. cat., The British Council, Venice, 1986, p. 9).
This seized immediacy is palpable in the present work, whose hairpin contours and bright colour-fields describe grass, paths, trees and sky with vivid and singular impact. The art historian T. J. Clark compared the spiked marks in the related composition Winter Evening, Primrose Hill Study (1974-1975) to ‘the spokes of a wind-wrecked umbrella … Nature for him seems to be instantaneous. It leaps out of the void. The paint contorts to capture it’ (‘On Frank Auerbach’, in Frank Auerbach, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2015, p. 12). The contortion and capture required a herculean effort. Auerbach would build up and scrape back the entire image countless times over weeks and months, often more than once in a day, before finally completing the painting in a single six- or seven-hour session.
The growth, greenery and movement of Primrose Hill, criss-crossed by paths and studded with lampposts and benches, brought Auerbach as close as he came to a pastoral subject. The park contrasted with the building sites and other urban views depicted in his earliest landscapes, and allowed him to draw upon the lessons of predecessors including Turner, Gainsborough and Constable. ‘It provided an “antidote” to the hard, angular forms of buildings’, notes Catherine Lampert. ‘… A connection to one of Auerbach’s favourite painters, John Constable, is inevitable. Auerbach says that like his predecessor he also became very familiar with his material and “actually tried to convey within the forms how things interlock, even where you can’t see them”’ (Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting, London, 2015, pp. 60-62).
While Auerbach admired Constable’s well-known mastery of ‘the clouds and the freshness and the light’, he claimed to be most impressed by the artist’s ‘doggedness’. ‘I can’t think of another painter who has invested quite so much in every single image,’ Auerbach said. ‘He seems to have walked every path, measured every distance between every tree. Everything has been worked for and made personal so you sometimes feel that Constable’s own body is somehow inside the landscapes there’ (quoted in T. Adams, ‘Frank Auerbach: Constable, Turner and me’, The Observer, 21 September 2014). It is this sense of embodied knowledge—everything ‘worked for and made personal’—that charges the present work with its extraordinary life, originality and vigour. ‘I’ve got certain attachments to people and places,’ Auerbach said in 1978, ‘and it seems to me simply to be less worthwhile to record things to which I’m less attached, since I know about things that nobody else knows about’ (in conversation with C. Lampert, 1978, in Frank Auerbach, op. cit., 2015, p. 147).
Auerbach moved to his Camden studio—previously occupied by his friend Leon Kossoff—in 1954, and painted Primrose Hill for the first time that year. That work’s earth-coloured, thickly encrusted surface corresponds to the central London ruins and building sites he was depicting in the same period. His methods were informed by his teacher David Bomberg, who sought to capture what he called ‘the spirit in the mass’ through repeated encounters with a subject. Fresh colours were introduced as Auerbach became able to afford them, and his treatment of the landscape gradually brightened and opened up, with a greater role given to skies, sunlight and windblown trees. He made daring forays into abstracted, angular colour and form in a trio of works from the late 1960s—including the Tate’s Primrose Hill (1967-1968)—which are developed further in the present work’s vibrant yellows, blues and greens. In total, Auerbach made some forty pictures of Primrose Hill. Thirteen are now held in museum collections, including Tate, London, the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.
When working on a Primrose Hill painting, Auerbach would begin each morning with a sketch made in-situ, ‘so as to have an impulse, an idea, a new fact, a newly discovered structure, to work from’ (letter to P. Marcus, 16 March 1972, Tate archive). He returned to the studio and pinned up older and newer drawings alongside the painting. They allowed him, he said, to recollect ‘what it was like to actually draw there that morning … I see the sunlight and the trees and the hill so I paint from these by looking at the drawing. In fact, like many people at the end of the painting, I’m looking at black and white drawings and the lines signal colours to me’ (quoted in C. Lampert, ‘Frank Auerbach’, in Frank Auerbach, exh. cat., The British Council, Venice, 1986, p. 9).
This seized immediacy is palpable in the present work, whose hairpin contours and bright colour-fields describe grass, paths, trees and sky with vivid and singular impact. The art historian T. J. Clark compared the spiked marks in the related composition Winter Evening, Primrose Hill Study (1974-1975) to ‘the spokes of a wind-wrecked umbrella … Nature for him seems to be instantaneous. It leaps out of the void. The paint contorts to capture it’ (‘On Frank Auerbach’, in Frank Auerbach, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2015, p. 12). The contortion and capture required a herculean effort. Auerbach would build up and scrape back the entire image countless times over weeks and months, often more than once in a day, before finally completing the painting in a single six- or seven-hour session.
The growth, greenery and movement of Primrose Hill, criss-crossed by paths and studded with lampposts and benches, brought Auerbach as close as he came to a pastoral subject. The park contrasted with the building sites and other urban views depicted in his earliest landscapes, and allowed him to draw upon the lessons of predecessors including Turner, Gainsborough and Constable. ‘It provided an “antidote” to the hard, angular forms of buildings’, notes Catherine Lampert. ‘… A connection to one of Auerbach’s favourite painters, John Constable, is inevitable. Auerbach says that like his predecessor he also became very familiar with his material and “actually tried to convey within the forms how things interlock, even where you can’t see them”’ (Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting, London, 2015, pp. 60-62).
While Auerbach admired Constable’s well-known mastery of ‘the clouds and the freshness and the light’, he claimed to be most impressed by the artist’s ‘doggedness’. ‘I can’t think of another painter who has invested quite so much in every single image,’ Auerbach said. ‘He seems to have walked every path, measured every distance between every tree. Everything has been worked for and made personal so you sometimes feel that Constable’s own body is somehow inside the landscapes there’ (quoted in T. Adams, ‘Frank Auerbach: Constable, Turner and me’, The Observer, 21 September 2014). It is this sense of embodied knowledge—everything ‘worked for and made personal’—that charges the present work with its extraordinary life, originality and vigour. ‘I’ve got certain attachments to people and places,’ Auerbach said in 1978, ‘and it seems to me simply to be less worthwhile to record things to which I’m less attached, since I know about things that nobody else knows about’ (in conversation with C. Lampert, 1978, in Frank Auerbach, op. cit., 2015, p. 147).