Primrose Hill

This evocative painting captures Frank Auerbach’s profound connection to the area near his studio in Mornington Crescent that he considered his own. 'This part of London is my world', he once remarked, 'I've been wandering around these streets for so long that I have become attached to them, and as fond of them as people are of their pets'. Auerbach’s focus on Primrose Hill exemplifies his approach to landscape painting in the city: a repeated exploration of the familiar surroundings he knew intimately and would return to throughout his life. The scene unfolds in thick, textured strokes of paint, rendered in earthy, muted tones typical of his early practice. London’s dense fog wraps around the hillside, blending seamlessly with the ochre tones of the earth below, symbolising the tension between nature and urban life, between a rural space nestled in the heart of the metropolis.

For Auerbach, landscape painting was a deeply personal act: ‘I feel London is this raw thing ... This extraordinary, marvelously unpainted city where whenever somebody tries to get something going they stop halfway through, and next to it something incongruous occurs ... this higgledy-piggledy mess of a city’ (the artist quoted in exhibition catalogue, Frank Auerbach Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, London, Royal Academy of Arts, 2001, p. 100). Here, Primrose Hill stands not only as a portrait of the physical landscape, but also as an embodiment of Auerbach’s attachment to the ever-changing, ever-evolving city he called home.

The present work is one of only three known small-scale paintings of this iconic locale painted by the artist in the 1950s. This early landscape was previously in the collection of the artist Joe Tilson, while another from the group was owned by R.B. Kitaj; a testament to his enduring influence upon the British figurative tradition, well recognised by those working around him.