Camberwell Nude

This is one of several important nudes that Euan Uglow painted during his formative years of training at Camberwell School of Art. The work’s female model stands on a raised platform. She is depicted in profile, with one hand resting on her hip and the other on a screen behind her. Uglow uses subtle variations in tone to create the impression of her face. Palpable brushstrokes, a simple scale and a limited palette indicate that the work was completed relatively quickly, most likely within or following a life class session at Camberwell.

In face and body, the sitter resembles that of Uglow’s Seated Nude, Green Stool (private collection) of the same year, which was suggested by his fellow students to have depicted Camberwell’s regular model ‘Miss Humphries’. She is almost certainly also represented in a watercolour sketch by fellow student Sir Terry Frost, entitled Humph (circa 1947-1954, private collection). The present work and Frost’s sketch seem to portray the same model, both depicting her brown hair and rounded forehead.

Uglow produced a considerable body of work in Camberwell’s life room. Learning from teachers such as William Coldstream and Claude Rogers, he secured a vital grounding in advanced life-drawing techniques, which were to become the foundation of his mature style. This painting in particular demonstrates that the young Uglow already valued the methods and practices that came to mark his later career: considered visual analysis and a studied approach to anatomical realism. In conversation with Andrew Lambirth, Uglow reflects on his time at Camberwell, revealing that he was already ‘thinking about analytical cubism’, and considered painting ‘too serious to take flippantly’ (exhibition catalogue, Euan Uglow, London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1989, p. 59).