We are grateful to Catherine Lampert for her kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.
‘I don’t see how anyone can be over-perfectionist. If you’ve got an idea, you’ve got to get it down. Sometimes you think you’ve got it there, but if you’re not careful you go too far and straight to paint another picture. Stopping has nothing to do with putting highlights in or gloss of hair. In most of the pictures it seems to have been the case that they had to go through a revolution before getting there.’
Part of a generation of painters who countered the prevailing drift and resisted the pull of abstraction, Uglow turned his attention to still life, landscape and, perhaps most significantly, depictions of the nude form in order to push the boundaries and definitions of figurative painting through his own disciplined aesthetic.
Studying under William Coldream first at Camberwell School of Art from 1947 until 1950, then at the Slade between 1951 and 1954, the two developed a close friendship and a similarly exacting system of constructing their paintings with the use of an architecture of small markings.
With carefully structured figures and lifelike palettes, you could be forgiven for believing that Uglow’s works are exact representations, forensic studies into the physiognomy and character of the sitter. In his own words, however, Uglow stated:
‘I’m painting an idea not an ideal… I’m trying to paint a structured painting full of controlled, and therefore potent, emotion. I won’t let chance be there unless it’s challenged.’
His remarkable diligence and focus are not, therefore, an examination of an individual and all that they encompass, but a calculated examination of a human figure. Removed from the sitter’s femininity and personal identity, Uglow presents us with an unencumbered study of the human form.