Frank Auerbach b. 1931

The present painting is one of the few early surviving images of E.O.W., the sitter who was to become the first of Auerbach’s series models. They first met in 1948, when Auerbach was seventeen and Stella West was a widow of thirty-two running a lodging-house in Earl’s Court. A fixed and regular pattern of sitting for Auerbach developed, and Stella’s recollections of these clearly demonstrate that the artist had already established his intensive and slow process of creating his paintings, with images been repeatedly scraped away and rubbed down, the chair he used as an easel becoming more and more encrusted with paint.

The influence of Bomberg’s teaching is clear in the present work. Auerbach attended his evening class at the Borough Polytechnic from 1948 (he was also studying at St.Martin’s and later at the RCA), and drew a great deal of inspiration from the elder figure. By this stage, Bomberg was virtually ignored by the artistic mainstream and yet his example of pursuing a goal with determination and perseverance was hugely influential to his pupils. By the early 1950s Bomberg’s figure and portrait painting style had become one almost exclusively concerned with constructing an image through the placing of the lights and darks of the essential form, and in Auerbach’s few surviving paintings from this period, the simplification of the image into planes of heavily applied pure colour is reminiscent of Bomberg’s own work. In the present work, unusually painted on cardboard and thus not easily reworked, the essential image of his sitter is presented through the clear placement of areas of colour. The pose, with the head turned down and away from the artist is one that appears in a number of early paintings, such as the images of his friend Leon Kossoff, for example the Head of Leon Kossoff 1954 (Private Collection), and the 1953 Head of E.O.W. (Private Collection). In its limited palette, and the alla prima handling, this painting also approaches the qualities of structure and compositional strength present in many of the early drawings of E.O.W., where the sitter emerges from the deep, dark shadows of the charcoal background, the raking light revealing the forms of her head.