Frank Auerbach

Primrose Hill – Winter

London, 1981-2

Oil on board

121.9 x 152.4 cm

Primrose Hill – Winter captures the moment at dusk when the park-like landscape is lit by the last glimmers of daylight and the streetlamps have just flickered into life – or, perhaps, the corresponding moment at dawn.

The strong diagonals of the footpaths give movement, structure and depth to the composition. Although reworked and revised over a prolonged period of time, this landscape is also, paradoxically, an expression of a momentary insight into the nature of an everyday scene. By 1955, Auerbach had settled in the Camden Town area of north London that has remained his home ever since. His later landscapes relate obsessively and exclusively to the immediately surrounding cityscape.

Accepted in lieu of Inheritance Tax by HM Government and allocated to the Henry Barber Trust (for the Barber Institute of Fine Arts) (No. 2015.1)