Nude on Back with Knees Raised belongs to a small group of nude paintings which Euan Uglow made in the early 1960s. He had recently moved to a new studio in Turnchapel Mews – the studio he remained in until his death – and inaugurated it by asking various female models to pose in the nude. Several of them were art students that he taught at Camberwell School of Art. In these nudes, he often demanded from his models a challenging array of gestures which generated problems of perspective and foreshortening. Nude on Back with Knees Raised takes a relatively casual pose, similar to that used in Young Nude Girl (1960, Glasgow Museums) (fig. 1): the model lies on her back staring absently into the space over the bed; her feet are crossed, though in Young Nude Girl the knees are not raised but rather dropped to one side; the pale skin around the abdomen and breasts is contrasted in each work with the sun-touched skin of face and legs.

Though Uglow used a narrow range of subjects, each of his paintings explore a different set of pictorial issues. Beneath a skin of eroticism lay the artist’s profound technical interest in the elementary make-up of a picture and, ultimately, his enduring fascination with the problems which result from plotting three dimensions into an intrinsically two-dimensional format. Though works such as Nude on Back with Knees Raised demonstrate a close proximity to the reclining nude figures which Lucian Freud painted in the 1950s, the conception is altogether original to Uglow. Where Freud’s Sleeping Nude of 1950 (fig. 2) is placid, highly controlled and pregnant with existential tension, Uglow’s figures combine frank sexuality with a purely pictorial emphasis on the flat plane of the tableau. The loose painterly features of Nude on Back with Knees Raised lend this work a sense of openness and spontaneity, as well as offering an insight into the painter’s approach to paint qua paint.

Nude on Back with Knees Raised was executed in the same year as Uglow’s summer visit to the south of France with his girlfriend Juliet Martyn. They stayed near Hyères and during the vacation she posed for Girl in the South of France (fig. 3). Similarities of composition and figure type between these two works, and the continuing intimacy between artist and muse, raises the possibility that Martyn was also the model for Nude on Back with Knees Raised.