Head of Julia II is a hard-won image of the artist’s wife. Auerbach made only two drawings of Julia immediately after they married in 1958, both in a characteristic idiom of heavily stressed charcoal with local flashes of colour (see fig. 1). These two images belong to the first period in Auerbach’s working life up to the early 1970s during which he worked in complete silence. An aura of intense and unspoken feeling prevails in the portraits of that time, and Head of Julia II is an image stricken with emotion: the sitter’s eyes are downcast, perhaps shut under the weight of tiredness, and her head is bowed forwards in contemplation or exhaustion. The work was made in evening sessions under electric light and Julia’s forehead is illuminated with highlights made by rubbing back to the white of the paper. The air around the sitter’s head shimmers with the naturalistic description of falling light.

Julia Wolstenholme and Auerbach met when they were both students at the Royal College of Art. Though he was involved elsewhere (his relationship with Stella West continued until 1973), Julia became pregnant and they married shortly before their son Jake was born in March 1958. The two drawings of her from 1960 were made at her home in Vincent Terrace, Islington, but their relationship dwindled and was not renewed until 1976. In 1978, Julia began sitting for Auerbach regularly and has continued to do so ever since. She is herself a painter though Auerbach admitted in 2012 he had never seen her work. Speaking in 2001, she said sitting for her husband was ‘like washing up’, eliding it with the traditional domestic chores of a housewife.

Head of Julia II was dated by the artist not once but twice. The year ‘1960’ was written, perhaps after a false finish, then scrubbed away. Auerbach often speaks of how a picture is finished, but also of the occasional ‘pseudo event’ when he ‘turns the thing to the wall, and turns it back again only to find that it hasn’t happened’. After its reworking, Head of Julia II was again inscribed ‘1960’ beside the ghostly remnant of the earlier date at the upper left corner. The two co-located inscriptions create a visual echo, emphasising the literal qualities of the surface in contrast to the verisimilitude of the sitter’s appearance. The face has been drawn, rubbed out and re-drawn repeatedly, and a striking likeness emerges from the smudges and scrapes. It has the quality of a mirror image, floating with liquid stillness in the hard-worked medium. The angular vermilion streaks at the bottom edge create a further visual jolt, overlaying the subject and accentuating the surface.

Sometimes Auerbach’s paper fragmented under the pressure of repeated rubbing out. This occurred more frequently in his drawings of the 1950s and 1960s, before he started using a thicker type of Arches NOT surface paper in the 1970s. It is telling that he preferred to ‘go on’, repairing the heavily worked sheet rather than discarding it in favour of new materials. Patching and fractures reveal the extended process that defines Auerbach’s drawings and elevates them above the traditional status of graphic art.

Unlike the other drawing of Julia from 1960 (fig. 1), which was sold to the barrister John Jopling through the Beaux Arts Gallery, Head of Julia II was made as a gift from artist to sitter and was owned by her for some time. Julia later sold the work through Auerbach’s then dealer, Marlborough Fine Art, and it was eventually acquired by Sebastian Walker (1942-1991). Walker was a publisher of children’s books and in 1979 founded Walker Books, the publications of which include Where’s Wally? by Martin Handford. Walker was an enthusiastic pianist and his friend Sally Grindley described him in an obituary as a perfectionist. He formed an important collection of post-war British art, coming to own works by Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, David Hockney and Howard Hodgkin, all of which were sold at Sotheby’s in 1991 following his premature death.