Euan Uglow enrolled in Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in 1947, aged just sixteen. He remained at Camberwell until 1950 when he followed William Coldstream to the Slade, where Coldstream had been made Professor the year previously. Painted with immense confidence and fluidity even at an early stage, Reclining Nude, 1949-50 foreshadows Uglow’s lifelong fascination with the female nude. Determined and ambition from the outset, Craigie Aitchison, a fellow student at the Slade, described Uglow’s dictatorial rule over the life rooms at the college, extending the length of each pose from one week to two or three weeks and demanding total silence. Coldstream had not painted any nudes since well before WWII, so Uglow’s immediate preoccupation with the nude was self-instigated. Whilst working through the legacy of Ingres’s tantalising odalisques and Sickert’s Camden Town nudes – Sickert later lectured at the Slade and was still a towering presence in the London art world – Uglow nonetheless, even here, transformed the genre of the nude with his distinctive personal vision.

Intimate, even voyeuristic, the diminutive size of the canvas augments the sense of a forbidden scene. Martin Golding argued in the catalogue essay for Uglow’s exhibition of nudes at the Whitechapel in 1989 that earlier and smaller pictures comparatively heighten the tactility of paint so “ brushstrokes seem to intimate an attitude, to express an emotion by the way they visibly handle the body”. The model reclines in a languid pose, her upper torso sinking into red cushions with her head thrown back in sensuous relaxation. Her neck is exposed and the curves of her body are augmented by the angular jutting upwards of her right hip. Her elongated form, stretched across the width of the canvas, prefigures Uglow’s later nudes, carefully positioned in contorted and extenuated poses, every muscle, tendon, and fold of skin scrutinised. With details of the shadows in her armpit, the highlights of white on her shins where light falls, and her slightly flushed cheeks, Uglow reconstitutes a living, breathing, individualised, female form in paint.