Catherine Lampert first encountered Frank Auerbach’s work in January 1967 when she was a student at University College London. Marlborough Fine Art had an exhibition of his recent nudes, heads and Camden townscapes. She has written of how the paintings she saw there ‘made an indelible impression on me’, with their ‘channels and skeins of paint’ and ‘the human subjects [which] suggested complicity’. Lampert began sitting for Auerbach in May 1978. She was an Arts Council exhibition organiser at the time and worked with the artist on his Hayward Gallery retrospective which opened the same month. She has been instrumental in pioneering Auerbach’s work over his career, helping to curate two further retrospectives at the Royal Academy in 2001 and Tate Britain in 2015.

Head of Catherine Lampert II is the second portrait Auerbach made of Lampert. (Many of his long-term sitters first sat for drawings, perhaps to establish their reliability before progressing to the longer process of a painting.) The armature of angular chalk accents and the modelling of scrubbed charcoal here lock together, creating decidedly three-dimensional volumes. A cloud of rubbed-down charcoal evokes the nucleus of the body, while firm strokes of chalk delineate the chin, cheekbones, shoulders, and the outline of the sitter’s short hair. The accents do not contain the figure, and the charcoal haze suggests a range of spatial positions and head movements, especially around the shoulders. The converging walls of the studio behind the figure are laid in simply and rapidly.

In Auerbach’s timetable-era portraits, a complex personal-professional bond exists between painter and sitter. Some of his longest-serving models have described the sense of fulfilment and satisfaction that grows from their part in the enterprise. In a letter to Catherine Lampert in 1994, Auerbach wrote in a reluctant but resolved tone that ‘you will obviously have to finish sometime’. His assumption proved incorrect, and her regular sittings continued until the end of the artist’s life. Referring to personal challenges at that time in her life, Lampert suggested that ‘[t]hese circumstances actually made me, like the other sitters, who are each dealing with their own issues, wish even more eagerly to continue posing.’