.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Radiant with warmth and vitality, the present work is a luminous portrait of one of Frank Auerbach’s most significant subjects. Over four decades, Juliet Yardley Mills (‘J.Y.M.’) became the backbone of his art, fuelling the evolution of his practice and taking her place among the twentieth century’s great muses. Painted in 1992, thirty-five years after her first portrait, the present work captures her seated on Auerbach’s Windsor chair: a constant prop in his unchanging studio. Closely related to an example of the same year held in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, as well as a seated portrait of 1981 held in Tate, London, the painting glows with tender intimacy. Calligraphic strokes of black paint stake out the contours of her form, while marbled passages of thick impasto animate her flesh. Jewel-like tones of ochre and terracotta flood the surface, spiked with white highlights and deep blue shadows. Since the 1950s, Auerbach’s near-sculptural brushwork had sought to capture the raw reality of his subjects. Never before seen in public, the present work depicts the woman who formed the very lifeblood of this investigation.
A professional life model known affectionately as ‘Jim’, Yardley Mills first met Auerbach while he was teaching at Sidcup College of Art. Beginning in 1957, she sat for him almost every Wednesday and Saturday, ultimately succeeding Stella West (‘E.O.W.’) as his primary muse from around 1963. Painting her, explained Auerbach, ‘was not quite like anything else … She took poses that were natural to her, and then I sometimes suggested things and one would go on. It became like a central spine of what one was doing’. A ‘harmonious, pale figure’ who reminded the artist of nineteenth-century French photographs, she was ‘able to sit for an infinite time, sometimes five hours without any break’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in C. Lampert, Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting, London 2015, pp. 184, 87). Yardley Mills herself spoke of her ‘terrific excitement’ for each session, waking at 5am and ‘[tearing] down those dark streets’. ‘We had a wonderful relationship because I thought the world of him and he was very fond of me’, she explained; ‘... we were close. Real friends’ (J. Yardley Mills, quoted in Frank Auerbach Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, exh. cat. Royal Academy of Arts, London 2001, p. 26).
In his small, sparse North London studio, Auerbach worked with laborious intensity, scraping and repainting his surfaces as sought to pin down the physical presence of his subjects. Painting the same sitters and settings over multiple years allowed him to refine this process, each iteration bringing him closer to unearthing what his teacher David Bomberg had famously described as ‘the spirit in the mass’. His paintings of Yardley Mills, wrote Robert Hughes, accelerated ‘the freedom and comparative wildness of his mature style, whose main point (apart from a deepened role for expressive colour) was to get the whole surface moving under the action of drawing, the decisive linear marks of the brush in liquid paint’ (R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 180). By the 1990s, this trajectory had reached its climax: the present work’s surface churns like a flowing river, aglow with the same vibrant palette that characterised his landscapes of the period. Yardley Mills’ form seems to fuse with the skeletal spindles of the chair, as if embedded into the fabric of his studio. While the lessons of Rembrandt, de Kooning, Giacometti and Picasso lurk within its depths, it is she who ultimately emerges as Auerbach’s great teacher, every inch of her form alive with intimate familiarity.
A professional life model known affectionately as ‘Jim’, Yardley Mills first met Auerbach while he was teaching at Sidcup College of Art. Beginning in 1957, she sat for him almost every Wednesday and Saturday, ultimately succeeding Stella West (‘E.O.W.’) as his primary muse from around 1963. Painting her, explained Auerbach, ‘was not quite like anything else … She took poses that were natural to her, and then I sometimes suggested things and one would go on. It became like a central spine of what one was doing’. A ‘harmonious, pale figure’ who reminded the artist of nineteenth-century French photographs, she was ‘able to sit for an infinite time, sometimes five hours without any break’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in C. Lampert, Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting, London 2015, pp. 184, 87). Yardley Mills herself spoke of her ‘terrific excitement’ for each session, waking at 5am and ‘[tearing] down those dark streets’. ‘We had a wonderful relationship because I thought the world of him and he was very fond of me’, she explained; ‘... we were close. Real friends’ (J. Yardley Mills, quoted in Frank Auerbach Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, exh. cat. Royal Academy of Arts, London 2001, p. 26).
In his small, sparse North London studio, Auerbach worked with laborious intensity, scraping and repainting his surfaces as sought to pin down the physical presence of his subjects. Painting the same sitters and settings over multiple years allowed him to refine this process, each iteration bringing him closer to unearthing what his teacher David Bomberg had famously described as ‘the spirit in the mass’. His paintings of Yardley Mills, wrote Robert Hughes, accelerated ‘the freedom and comparative wildness of his mature style, whose main point (apart from a deepened role for expressive colour) was to get the whole surface moving under the action of drawing, the decisive linear marks of the brush in liquid paint’ (R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London 1990, p. 180). By the 1990s, this trajectory had reached its climax: the present work’s surface churns like a flowing river, aglow with the same vibrant palette that characterised his landscapes of the period. Yardley Mills’ form seems to fuse with the skeletal spindles of the chair, as if embedded into the fabric of his studio. While the lessons of Rembrandt, de Kooning, Giacometti and Picasso lurk within its depths, it is she who ultimately emerges as Auerbach’s great teacher, every inch of her form alive with intimate familiarity.