One morning in 2015, the photographer Nicola Bensley paid a visit to Frank Auerbach. Shooting on black and white 35-millimetre film in natural light, she captured a series of images warm with Auerbach’s charm, energy and humour. She arrived promptly, knocking at the door on the hour, and presented a gift of cheese and charcoal crackers (a suggestion of the artist’s son Jake). The morning passed in a friendly back and forth, the artist’s usual role swapped for that of a sitter, the quiet of the studio enlivened by conversation and the click of the camera’s shutter. The photographs are presented here in the order they were taken, tracing the morning from a shy beginning to its relaxed conclusion. The series is newly published, including five previously unseen images.

A Morning in the Studio shows Auerbach in the world he has made. He has lived and worked in his Mornington Crescent studio since 1954. He took it on when his friend Leon Kossoff left and has been there ever since. Referring to decades of financial insecurity which he endured until 1980 or so, he has said, ‘I needed this space so I clung to it like a drowning man to a raft.’ The worry of eviction only receded when he bought the freehold around 1983. Michael Peppiatt described it as ‘the most astonishing work space I had ever seen: a drab little cavern made extravagantly visual, almost opulent, by the traces and layerings of paint that covered it from wall to wall.’ When he started sitting for Auerbach in the 1980s, David Landau has said it was ‘like something out of La Bohème.’

Though he changed the floor lino three times over the decades, it was not until the ceiling collapsed in 1990 that Auerbach agreed to have the studio refurbished. The swollen mound of paint underfoot was removed; central heating and an indoor lavatory were installed. But the studio quickly regained its patina of scabrous discarded paint. Auerbach’s method of painting, blotting off, and re-painting at the next session is inseparable from the encrusted environment which it creates.