For four years between 1949 and ‘53, Frank Auerbach learned to draw in evening classes held at the Borough Polytechnic in South London. His teacher was the painter David Bomberg, an artist of conviction whose expressionist work went unrecognised in his lifetime. In Auerbach’s words, he had an ‘original, stubborn, radical intelligence’, and these qualities rubbed off on some of his students. Auerbach took much from Bomberg’s draughtsmanship: his use of scabrous charcoal, the emphatic drawing and re-drawing of a figure’s outline, the repeating pattern of energetic rubbing off and smudging, and the blasphemous need to give the image a life of its own. As Auerbach acknowledged later, it was Bomberg’s ‘practical instruction’ which made an impact on him. The restless mood of the evening classes was also a formative influence on Auerbach and shaped his subsequent approach to working from life models. As he explained, There was a radical atmosphere in those classes. There was a feeling that in the rest of the art schools something presentable had to be presented, but in those classes there was an atmosphere of research and of radicalism which was extremely stimulating. For me, very few works that could be described as works of art were produced there, but anything that seemed artificial or concocted or sort of a false sauce or gravy on an insufficiently vital fact would be rejected by Bomberg. Though aspects of his drawing style changed in subsequent decades, for the rest of his career Auerbach retained the same restless sense of research – striving for a ‘vital fact’ – which he discovered in Bomberg’s classes. Reclining Nude was made when Auerbach was a student at the Royal College of Art (1952-55), shortly after he left Bomberg’s life classes. He has described achieving a sense of artistic independence as early as 1952 and, in line with this assertion, early drawings like this show an unusual degree of consistency with his subsequent output. The firm application and jagged quality of the mark-making and the integral quality of the marks themselves in constituting the subject are comparable to Auerbach’s later draughtsmanship. Though in later years he always used the same long-serving sitters, Nude Standing was probably made in the RCA life-drawing class from an anonymous model. In 1953, a year before making this drawing, Auerbach started drawing and painting Estella Olive West (‘E.O.W.’) at his studio in Mornington Crescent. Two paintings of her from 1953-54, both titled E.O.W. Nude (Tate Collection and formerly the collection of Leon Kossoff), show her spread across a sofa. She lies on her front, exposing her naked back and posterior. It is plausible that Reclining Nude was also a depiction of West, though it is more probably from the RCA life room. Nevertheless, such works from the early 1950s belong to a single practice, demonstrating Auerbach’s emerging interest at the time in the female nude and the many different postures available to it. Both Reclining Nude and E.O.W. Nude are composed from a raised perspective, implying the figure of the artist standing over the model, and this became a significant theme in some of his subsequent work. As Auerbach has said, he later destroyed many of the life drawings which he made in the early 1950s. Surviving examples like Reclining Nude provide important insights into the development of the artist’s draughtsmanship, demonstrating the early stage at which he formulated a forceful, unpretentious way to approach the defining subject of his career. * The provenance of this work is Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, London. The work was deaccessioned in 2018 as part of a wide ranging reassessment of its Collection and Collecting policies which addressed the modus operandi of this physically small scale institution resulting in their Sustainability and Public Benefit Strategy. Their revised, enlightened, strategic plan and core public benefit objectives drove their transformation into the first full scale virtual museum and research centre in 2019. Many works have been transferred free of charge to other museum collections and the funds raised from sales are being reinvested for the benefit of the charity in general funding new acquisitions and enhancing the museum’s research unit studying, and digitally recording, the Jewish and immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.