The Tree Opposite depicts a view from the entrance of Frank Auerbach’s studio in North London. The tree, one of several large plane trees along Albert Street in Mornington Crescent, is on the ‘opposite’ side of the road from where Auerbach lives and works. The studio is accessible down a narrow passageway between two neighbouring properties, and The Tree Opposite uses the houses on the left and right as framing devices to create a tightly structured composition. These buildings rise up steeply and crop the sky to a small patch of grey-blue at the centre of the painting’s upper edge. A short flight of steps, painted with a hue of bruised aubergine, is apparent in the midground: they separate the immediate foreground from the tree, which appears immediately above them in the pictorial scheme. The colours of the scene are not descriptive but rather suggestive: the dominant axis of purple and orange evokes the deep shadows and bright sunshine of late spring or summer.

As with all of Auerbach’s paintings, The Tree Opposite transforms its subject into a compact picture of unexpected rhythms and quirky patterns. The tree is evoked by a broken silhouette of decisive, angular brushstrokes. The crowning brushstroke of lilac was made using a wide brush loaded with paint and three distinct changes of direction; neighbouring areas of yellow and orange were picked up by the stroke, and these colours pulse at the edges. Such formally immaculate brush marks, individually apparent, contribute to an overall framework or ‘scaffolding’ of similar markings which are rich with formal suggestion. The outlines of the buildings intersect like lines of force, directed downwards and towards the centre of the image: steeply foreshortened rooflines at the top of the painting become the walls of each building, and the sloping barrier in the bottom left quarter mirrors the rooflines above. Finally, space in the picture has been steeply contracted, aligning the foreground, the steps and the tree along the same flattened plane. The effect is to create the whole scene in a single, quivering surface of dazzling shapes and colours.

Auerbach moved to his Albert Street studio in 1954. He has been painting the local streets and surroundings ever since. He began with Primrose Hill that same year and progressed to the Carrera cigarette factory round the corner and the traffic lights by Mornington Crescent Underground station. Between 1982 and 1985, Auerbach became acutely interested in the passageway leading ‘To the Studios’ (these words are daubed on a small sign affixed to a neighbouring house). He acquired the freehold of his studio in around 1981, thus ending decades of financial uncertainty, and the works which he produced at that time may have been an elated acknowledgement of his newly permanent situation. Each painting entitled To the Studios looks along the path leading to Auerbach’s place of work. By contrast, The Tree Opposite is a direct inversion of this view and instead looks the other way along the same passage. The resulting pictures are entirely different in structure and emphasis.

When he is engrossed in a subject from his surroundings, Auerbach often makes several paintings of it in quick succession. The artist does not regard the resulting works as a ‘series’ like Monet’s haystacks, a group of paintings made with the goal of studying a single motif under changing atmospheric conditions. Auerbach instead insists upon the individual identity of each work. Four paintings entitled The Tree Opposite were painted in 2008 and 2009, two larger versions and two smaller versions. The painting under consideration here is one of the two larger works. All four were exhibited in Auerbach’s solo exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art in 2009. Prior to The Tree Opposite, his outdoor subjects included Tower Blocks, Hampstead Road (2007-08) and The Awning (2008), and paintings of these were also show in the 2009 Marlborough exhibition.

Writing in the London Review of Books to coincide with the exhibition, Auerbach’s friend and sitter William Feaver described The Tree Opposite and the circumstances which brought this cycle to a close.

Early this year Auerbach relinquished the last of several versions of The Tree Opposite, paintings of the wall along one side of the alley outside his studio, the steps, a wicket gate, and hints of parked cars under ebullient foliage. For more than 50 years this view, always seen first thing in the morning when setting off to draw outdoors, was undisturbed; but now, abruptly, neighbours over the wall have stuck up white fencing, either for privacy or to add some glamour to their 1960s property.

Feaver’s comments show how changeable London’s locales can be, and how receptive Auerbach is to even the smallest of changes.

The practice of working simultaneously on large and small cityscape paintings was reinforced after his studio was refurbished in 1990. Some working space was lost to an indoor lavatory and a mezzanine level for a bed, and it became awkward for Auerbach to work on more than one large cityscape painting at a time. Since then, he has worked on a large cityscape alongside ‘small versions of the same subject, sometimes beginning one mid-way through working on the large picture’. Auerbach has told Catherine Lampert that the smaller versions ‘are not replicas and are not studies, they are just to keep one’s mind moving, different conceptions of the subject’.