Reclining Head of Julia is a recent painting by Frank Auerbach, one of the most original British painters of his generation. The work has not previously been offered for sale. It depicts the artist’s wife, Julia, in a recumbent pose with her head sunk down in a pillow. She often falls asleep during sittings and the painting registers the somnambulant weight of her figure, her head weighing heavy on the pillow. Auerbach has only painted reclining heads of his female sitters. These works are among the most sinewy, irreducible paintings in his career, and he has spoken appreciatively of ‘these unfamiliar angles of the human head’. Their vivid structures and strange shapes do not resolve at once into a comprehensible image; once it registers, however, the subject becomes inescapable and seems as vivid as the living thing.

Julia Wolstenholme met Auerbach when they were both students at the Royal College of Art. Though he was involved elsewhere (his relationship with Stella West continued until 1973), Julia became pregnant and they married in 1958 shortly before their son Jake was born in March that year. She first sat for two drawings by Auerbach in 1960, but their relationship dwindled and was not renewed until 1976. In 1978, Julia began sitting regularly and has continued ever since. She is herself a painter though Auerbach admitted in 2012 he had never seen her work. Speaking in 2001, she said sitting for her husband was ‘like washing up’, eliding it with the traditional domestic chores of a housewife.

To flourish, the artist Walter Sickert once wrote that art must be practised ‘as a bread-winning occupation’. From the beginning of his career, Auerbach’s paintings and drawings were loaded with mortal urgency. With nowhere else to go, for much of his life he has slept, eaten and worked in the same small studio, living modestly and working long hours. A fear of poverty and eviction lingered. He had to work to live, both creatively and financially, and without a studio he would be unable to do either. When these anxieties abated in the 1980s, his habits were formed, and so he continued the same bread-winning occupation: ‘I’d like to do a bit of painting, put on a white linen suit, and then have dinner at the Ritz. It’s because I can’t that I have to go on so long.’

Painted during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Reclining Head of Julia shows Auerbach continuing his career-long struggle to trap visual facts in art. She alone continued as his sole sitter during the period of social distancing, which prohibited Auerbach’s other sitters from attending their weekly sessions. The work is predominated by yellow ochre, both in the flattened surroundings of the soft pillow and the textured brushstrokes used for the head. An underlying area of pale lilac is revealed at the lower edge of the painting, while contrasting notes of green and orange worked in wet-on-wet appear in the face. The dark accents outlining the throat, jaw and facial features have a calligraphic urgency.

Auerbach has made more reclining head pictures of Julia than of any other sitter. He made the first of these works in 1993 and has continued almost continuously since that time. Within the narrow confines of this format – the head always viewed from beneath the chin and the picture often cropped close at the neck – Auerbach has continued to create original paintings and drawings of which no two examples are the same. Each image uses a unique combination of accents and colours (fig. 1). Different degrees of foreshortening, abstraction and exaggeration are at play in each case. The reclining head paintings of Julia might be regarded as the outstanding works of Auerbach’s maturity, a unique and intimate corpus that could not have been made by any other artist.