Catherine Lampert Seated II depicts one of Frank Auerbach’s regular models, Catherine Lampert, who began sitting for him in 1978. It was made at his studio in Albert Street, Mornington Crescent. She is seated in a Windsor chair, which is familiar from many other drawings and paintings by Auerbach from 1961 onwards. The broad, rounded top rail of the chair frames Lampert’s head. The figure is predominantly painted in a blistering hue of adulterated cadmium yellow. Applied wet-on-wet, it blended with other colour notes, even as it retained a brilliant clarity and saturation. The composition is structured by straight lines, variously referred to as ‘finalising lines’ or ‘accents’. They were made in contrastingly dark colours of red, crimson, purple and dark blue, which were laid over the subject. As with all of Auerbach’s work made from the early seventies onwards, the constellation of accents creates a geometric pattern that has a forceful rhythm and shape. Although the accents are discrete, they are inseparable from the image they help to construct.

Auerbach often repeated the same subject or composition in a small number of successive paintings and drawings. He was motivated by an insatiable thoroughness: his sitters continually presented new and unexpected aspects, and small revelations—defined against previous observations recorded in paintings and drawings—provided the impulse to continue studying the same models. Catherine Lampert Seated II belongs to a sequence of three half-length paintings made in 1990 and 1991, all of which depict Lampert seated in a chair with her hands clasped together in her lap. In all three paintings, a tight crop caused the sitter’s head to graze the upper edge of the picture and her elbows to touch the sides. Although the paintings use different colour notes, they all include similar hues of yellow and orange. These three paintings of Lampert coincided with five paintings of Julia Yardley Mills (‘J.Y.M.’), made in 1990 and 1991, which also depict the model seated in a chair in a frontal composition.

Auerbach’s mature style of painting, which he referred to as an ‘idiom’, is partly defined by richly textured surfaces. Like all of his work, Catherine Lampert Seated II was executed in a single round of painting after an extended period of sittings; the work of previous sittings was always scraped away before he began again at the next session. By completing his paintings in ‘one wet’, Auerbach was able to create dense layers and overlapping structures of brushwork. Each application of paint was made with a loaded brush, and each stroke extends through a remarkable length without loss of intensity or richness of colour. Each brush mark is singular and legible. As Auerbach explained to Richard Cork in 1983, he regarded painting as ‘drawing in slabs rather than edges, but it’s all drawing to me.’ Owing to his wet-on-wet technique, each slab of fresh paint quivered against existing marks and picked up other colours along its edges. The thickness and body of Auerbach’s oil medium is also remarkable, and this quality enabled him to overpaint while retaining the textures and colours of underlying brushwork. The result is a complex surface, at once superficial and densely layered. In Catherine Lampert Seated II, the background is especially dense with overlayed brushwork, which simultaneously cancels underlying marks while interacting with them and allowing ghostly impressions of them to appear in the paint surface.

The palette of Catherine Lampert Seated II uses some of the lighter, more varied colours that Auerbach began to adopt in the nineties. After Auerbach started painting with acrylic at his Finsbury Park studio in 1987, he recognised of his acrylic paintings that he was ‘slightly more enterprising in the colours I order.’ This had consequences for his oil paintings, which he continued to make at his studio in Mornington Crescent: the palette became lighter and more varied, likely as an indirect result of his colour experiments in acrylic. Isolated notes of pink and bright blue are visible in the surface of the painting. As Auerbach remarked to Judith Bumpus in 1986, ‘[a] painting that might be crisp and done in the colours of the prism, that is in yellow, orange, red, purple, blue and green, could change in half an hour into a more or less black and white painting.’