Like his spiritual tutor Walter Sickert, another artist resident in Mornington Crescent, Auerbach is a habitual draughtsman. Starting with the building site series of the mid-1950s, his cityscape paintings were made in the studio with the aid of drawings made directly from the motif. Some of these studies were annotated with colour notes and squared-up for transfer. The studies soon lost the trappings of formality, however, and the energetic impulse of works such as Mornington Crescent stems from an intense, alert confrontation with the subject. As working drawings, made for the purpose of a painting, these sheets acquired a patina from their time in the studio. Mornington Crescent is spotted with oil and small splatters of paint, accretions that enhance the character of the work and indicate the studio environment where they were put to use.

Since the 1950s, Frank Auerbach’s practice has been to start the day by going out and sketching from life. These drawings set in motion the day’s work and stimulate his pictorial imagination. Throughout his career, Auerbach has typically worked on one or two large cityscape paintings at a time. In the course of making a single work, an endeavour of many months, he continually returns each morning to the motif. To begin with, the drawings he makes are concerned with establishing the elementary facts of a composition: the relationship of the central forms, the number of windows in a building, and so on.

Mornington Crescent relates to several paintings of the junction around Mornington Crescent Underground Station. A painting of the same title (1967, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) (fig. 1) depicts the same view: a four-storey building is in the centre ground, its façade arranged in parallel to the picture plane; to the right, a street runs to the horizon and the facing terraced houses are steeply foreshortened as they recede; the foreground is filled with a maze of streetside furniture – railings, bollards, scaffolding, and so on. This study also includes a clearly visible triangular street sign amid the densely woven hatching. Though Auerbach made a large number of studies for every finished painting, only a few drawings from the 1960s have been released for sale; most are kept in the studio or destroyed. One closely comparable work was ripped from a ring-bound sketchbook (fig. 2).

From the 1970s, Auerbach began to make his streetscape studies using coloured wax crayons and felt-tip pens. His earlier studies of the 1960s, including Mornington Crescent, have a tense wiry construction. Strokes of the pencil are added without being revised, with further strokes being made to correct and amend previous ones. This additive approach, spurred on by a rush of visual sensation, is given urgency by the shifting quality of the light and the pressure of the moment.