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Lot Essay
Datable to the early 1950s, this is one of relatively few surviving youthful drawings by Auerbach. The recto of the sheet contains a very free and spirited copy after Turner’s monumental oil of The Parting of Hero and Leander, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1837 and today in the National Gallery in London (inv. no. NG 521; fig. 1). Auerbach almost certainly saw Turner’s painting at the Tate Gallery, however, where the work was on loan from the National Gallery between 1929 and 1961. The landscape paintings of the 18th and early 19th century British School - notably the works of Turner, Constable and Gainsborough – seem to have had the most profound effect on Auerbach.
‘I think I have a sort of penchant for the whole of English painting. It is as though it isn’t held up by a scaffolding of theory or of philosophy...that it was arrived at empirically, as though there is a sort of fresh wind blowing through a room of English painting, that is nowhere else in the National Gallery. I find myself at home here.’ (quoted in C. Wiggins, Frank Auerbach and the National Gallery: Working after the Masters, exh. cat., London, National Gallery, 1995, p.16).
The verso of the sheet, which is squared for transfer, depicts a building site in London; a subject that occupied the artist for much of the 1950s. Auerbach was fascinated by the intense programme of building and reconstruction being undertaken in post-war London in the late 1940s and 1950s, following the devastation caused by the Blitz. As he recalled in 2007, ‘It was almost fortuitous that just after the war, when I did these things, London was a ruin, and so I painted bomb sites and building sites and so on, which looked absolutely marvellous: grand mountain landscapes all over London.’ (‘Frank Auerbach in conversation with W. Feaver’, W. Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York, 2009, p. 229).
Rather excitingly, what is presumably the artist's finger prints can be seen to the lower and left edges of the sheet.
‘I think I have a sort of penchant for the whole of English painting. It is as though it isn’t held up by a scaffolding of theory or of philosophy...that it was arrived at empirically, as though there is a sort of fresh wind blowing through a room of English painting, that is nowhere else in the National Gallery. I find myself at home here.’ (quoted in C. Wiggins, Frank Auerbach and the National Gallery: Working after the Masters, exh. cat., London, National Gallery, 1995, p.16).
The verso of the sheet, which is squared for transfer, depicts a building site in London; a subject that occupied the artist for much of the 1950s. Auerbach was fascinated by the intense programme of building and reconstruction being undertaken in post-war London in the late 1940s and 1950s, following the devastation caused by the Blitz. As he recalled in 2007, ‘It was almost fortuitous that just after the war, when I did these things, London was a ruin, and so I painted bomb sites and building sites and so on, which looked absolutely marvellous: grand mountain landscapes all over London.’ (‘Frank Auerbach in conversation with W. Feaver’, W. Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York, 2009, p. 229).
Rather excitingly, what is presumably the artist's finger prints can be seen to the lower and left edges of the sheet.