Frank Auerbach

Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London
Collection Baroness Gabrielle Wilhelmina Hedwig Maria Bentinck
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Contemporary Art Part II, 30 November 1995, Lot 210
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York 2009, p. 284, no. 414, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly lighter in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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"If E.O.W. was a magnetic force, J.Y.M. by contrast was a force of nature, adaptable, optimistic and uncomplaining."

Catherine Lampert, 'Auerbach and His Sitters', Exhibition Catalogue, London, Royal Academy of Art, Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, 2001, p. 26.


Executed the year following his highly acclaimed retrospective show hosted by the Arts Council at the Hayward Gallery, J.Y.M Seated, 1979 is an exceptional exposition of Frank Auerbach’s mature style and sits at the very height of his canon of portraiture. Amid swathes of dramatic brushwork and sculptural surface reworked time and time again, the tangible intensity of Auerbach’s subject materialises.

Throughout his career Auerbach has pursed the same subjects, close friends and admirers of his work and none more so than Juliet Yardley Mills who first posed for him in 1956 when she was a professional model at Sidcup College of Art, and continued to do so for over forty years until 1997. Catherine Lampert, who has sat for Auerbach since 1978, has accounted that J.Y.M. became the first regular sitter at the artist’s Camden studio, where he had moved in 1954. According to William Feaver, she could sustain awkward poses for four hours or more and hugely valued sitting for the artist: “It was the most marvellous thing in my life” (in the film: Frank Auerbach: To the Studio cited in: William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York 2009, p. 19). She arrived every Wednesday and Sunday until 1997 having taken two buses from her home in southeast London. She has said “we had a wonderful relationship because I thought the world of him and he was very fond of me. There was no sort of romance but we were close. Real friends. Sundays now I’m always miserable” (Juliet Yardley Mills cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Royal Academy of Arts, Frank Auerbach, 2001, p. 26).

Beautifully composed through a deep and expressive role of colour and a faultless display of decisive and heavily impastoed brushwork, the present work charts a terrific psychological and emotional expression in a manner akin to de Kooning’s explosive Women series, which dynamically illustrates the artist’s familiarity with the sitter. Layers of paint, subtle mutations of blues, greens and browns, characteristically layered and carved set as a muted backdrop for decisive brushstrokes of yellow ochre and orange that highlights and elevates the hour glass silhouette of the sitter.  J.Y.M sits upright, her back firmly pressed against the back of the supporting tall Windsor chair, exuding an imposing presence within the composition. Her head slightly tilted, expressionless and virtually supressed, her right eye as a black hollow whilst the left side of her face disappears in the shadows of the dense architectural niche of the chair, her arms and legs summarised by long fluid strokes of green and yellow. 

In J.Y.M Seated, we bear witness to Auerbach’s masterful handling of paint application and structural composition. The immediate force and vigour of execution of the present work demonstrates Auerbach's intimate psychological response to his subjects and further serves as an outstanding exemplification of the ”theatrical dialogue between artist and painting [and] engenders the drama of the finished work” (Isabel Carlisle in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Royal Academy of Arts, Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, 2001, p. 62).