In Head of William Feaver, the surroundings of the sitter’s head are cleanly painted in flattened areas of blue, green, puce and vermilion. In 1998, Frank Auerbach expressed a desire ‘to paint by juxtaposing one area of colour against another, and hoping that that will make the form’. He called this ‘the grandest way of painting’. Though he has continued to use darkened ‘accents’ to construct the form, many paintings of the late 1990s and 2000s achieved this grandeur, using neighbouring areas of full colour to suggest the volume and shape of a head and its surroundings.

This painting of William Feaver from 2008 depicts him at a three-quarter-length angle, turning to the left and wearing an open-necked shirt. The execution of the work is highly individual. Auerbach never repeats himself, stating that ‘the whole business of painting is to capture some undiscovered territory for art.’ An animated jawline and mouth is painted swiftly and searchingly with a fine brush in blue, brown, purple and red. The facial features emerge only gradually from a build-up of evocative marks. As the artist once reflected, ‘the irrational marks actually seem a better record than the literal ones. They suggest things’.

Feaver has described sitting for Auerbach as a ‘ritualised’ experience. The demands of the ritual produce an unusual relationship, at once familiar and oriented around the purpose of sitting. Just as Catherine Lampert recalls chatting about a Kraftwerk gig she had been to, Feaver has described a ‘stream of comment and gossip, literary and otherwise.’ Speaking of Feaver, Auerbach has remarked that ‘Bill has very interesting things to say’. Each element of the ritual somehow feeds into the image that emerges from it.

Throughout his career, Auerbach has been blessed with sitters who are also highly articulate members of the art world. William Feaver first wrote about Auerbach in an essay for his exhibition at Marlborough Galerie, Zürich, in 1976. He later authored a monograph about Auerbach, first published in 2009 and updated in 2022. He started sitting for Auerbach in February 2003. Along with Auerbach’s wife Julia, his son Jake, David Landau and Catherine Lampert, Feaver has been one of the long-serving sitters in the artist’s ‘rigid timetable’. As with the art critic Robert Hughes, who sat for a drawing before writing a monograph about the artist, Feaver’s sittings coincided with work on his own Auerbach monograph. Unlike Hughes, who regularly flew in from New York to sit and was relieved when the drawing was finished, Feaver continued modelling for Auerbach one evening a week. Their mutual friend Lucian Freud sometimes asked Feaver, ‘Are you Franking tonight?’