Frank Auerbach, Christmas Tree at Mornington Crescent, 2004-05

Frank Auerbach’s powerful painting Christmas Tree at Mornington Cresent (2004-05) captures a corner of London that was much more to him than an artistic motif. Situated close to his Camden Town studio, it formed part of the small constellation of north London sites to which he returned obsessively over the decades, anchoring his practice in a landscape shaped as much by memory as by observation. There is something of the faded boarding house about the area. The streets of Regency terraces have long since passed into the hands of the better off, yet the buses still rattle by, there is the odd tatty corner shop, and the stucco has a propensity towards the drab.

Auerbach moved here in 1954, after Leon Kossoff suggested he take over his studio — a cramped building behind a Victorian villa on Albert Street. For the next 70 years, this neighbourhood — situated between the cigarette factory and the Tube station — would shape Auerbach’s art. The radial streets became the subject of his radical visions, the area’s buildings appearing repeatedly in shifting forms.

In those days, there was an unsettled, ramshackle busyness to post-war London. Amid the boarded-up churches, and sites where traders operated between the bomb craters, were the beginnings of the welfare state, of which the tower block was the most visible manifestation — ascending out of an Aral Sea of Victorian brick and stained concrete. As London struggled to rebuild itself, Auerbach realised that this half-formed landscape had ‘not been properly painted’, not in the way Paris or New York had been. He resolved to become its Boswell — a chronicler of its uneven terrain in dense, sinewy strokes of paint.

‘London is not a planned city,’ he once observed. ‘As soon as anybody tries to set one style or set one architectural scheme in motion, they run out of steam and somebody puts something entirely incongruous next to it.’ This confusion fascinated the artist: with each incoherent shift in the city’s character, Auerbach recorded its wounds in slippages of paint.

Christmas Tree at Mornington Crescent is offered on 18 March 2026 in the Modern British and Irish Art Evening Sale at Christie’s in London. Distinguished not only by its commanding scale and extraordinary vibrancy, the work is a triumphant celebration of the power of paint to capture a landscape rich in memory. It is one of the largest paintings Auerbach made of the neighbourhood. Dominated by the hard-edged shape of the former Carreras Cigarette Factory, the Art Deco headquarters of the makers of Craven A — ‘The Cork-Tipped Cigarette’ — the painting is a dynamic portrayal of this lively corner of the metropolis under grey December skies. Its sister painting, Mornington Crescent — Summer Morning (2004), presenting the same locale in sunnier light, is in the Tate collection.

You can be thrown off balance by the intense energy of an Auerbach painting. The overreaching arcs and counterstrokes are like a map of struggle and release. What looks almost like an action painting is, in fact, a highly wrought exercise in persistence.

Explaining his process in 1986, he said: ‘I cover the picture in the first half-hour. I find it inadequate. So I scrape it down and have another go. I find that doesn’t work, I scrape it down and have another go. It is very testing.’ It was an effort that could go on for weeks, months and sometimes even years.

This laborious method can be traced back to Auerbach’s tutor at Borough Polytechnic in the early 1950s, David Bomberg, who reduced the city to a vibrant palette of double-decker red, green and blue, in free form. Bomberg saw a raw abstraction in London’s mayhem and encouraged his students to embrace the city’s vitality rather than seek out order in its chaotic topography.

A clue to another artistic influence can be found just beyond the picture frame of Christmas Tree at Mornington Crescent. At the junction of Camden High Street and Hampstead Road stands a statue of the Liberal firebrand Richard Cobden, who was also the father-in-law of the 19th-century painter Walter Sickert.

Like Auerbach, Sickert saw in the shabby gentility of Camden Town, with its cloth-capped boozers and resilient inhabitants, a place where reality struck back. ‘London is spiffing,’ he wrote, ‘such evil racy little faces and such a comfortable feeling of a solid basis of beef and beer. O the whiff of leather and stout from the swing doors of the pubs! Why aren’t I Keats to sing them?’ In Sickert’s paintings, London is often fog-bound, all gloomy shadows and pinched atmosphere. ‘I recognise my life in those streets and in those bedrooms,’ said Auerbach. ‘I felt at home in Sickert’s world.’

For Auerbach, however, London’s reality was not only a subject but something embedded in the physical structure of the work itself. There are many layers of ruin in Auerbach’s paintings of Mornington Crescent. Their thick surfaces resemble an open archaeological site in which the traces of the nation’s post-war history can be seen. Just as the city continuously rebuilds itself, so Auerbach compresses, scrapes away and reworks the surface of the painting.

‘And that’s like the character of London,’ he said, ‘and I do rather like it. If painting is making order out of chaos, then we have to be provided with a great deal of chaos. You get it in London.’

The Modern British and Irish Art Evening and Day sales are on view until 18 March 2026 at Christie’s in London

Christie’s 20th/21st Century Art auctions take place in London and online, until 19 March 2026. Explore the preview exhibition and sales