Primrose Hill

Auerbach's palette in the early to mid 1950s was restricted to black, white and earth pigments as these were the only oils that he could afford to buy in the quantities he needed to produce these thickly encrusted paintings. Primrose Hill near Regents Park has been the artist's principal model for landscape from the date of this work until the present day. R. Hughes reports the artist as saying ''I was born old and wanted to make a dignified perverse image, a formal image'. By 1954-55 he knew he had to do it by painting something specific and unvarying over and over and over again. Reiteration went against the ideal of virtuosity shared by many young English artists after the war: ... 'in the early 50s there was talk of people painting a show in three months, or something like that, which seemed to me somehow to be superficial and illustrative and deedy and skimpy and just simply not what paintings require ... part of this instinct of revulsion against the current art may have produced in me a strong feeling that one would try to emphasise what was more permanent than a decorative or linear concoction. This was where the energy came from, and it may be the thickness of the paint was something to do with this since my way of painting is not a question of chosing a uniform ... I can now see why people thought there was something blatant and indigestible about [my early paintings]. But I can assure you that when I did them they simply felt to me to be true'.
(R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London, 1990, p.77).