Uglow first painted this scene looking through the window of his ‘front studio’ in Turnchapel Mews towards Clapham Junction, south-west London, in 1980-83, Winter Sun. Uglow lived throughout his life in south-west London, moving from Norwood to Turnchapel Mews, his studio and home, in 1959. Like Coldstream, Auerbach, and Kossoff – ‘School of London’ painters - Uglow was a painter in and of the city; London was part of the fibre of his make-up. Like Auerbach and Kossoff, Uglow was devoted to the National Gallery, visiting every Sunday to sketch from the Old Masters. He taught every Friday without fail at the Slade, a familiar and respected figure amongst this inter-generational artistic community and a frequent presence at their favourite watering holes across London. Turnchapel Mews became, like Freud’s studio, famed in its own right, for its simultaneous stage-sets like miniature worlds covered in chalk marks and nails, the black and white chequered tiles and stencilled circles on the walls which appeared in numerous pictures, for the sixty and upwards sittings Uglow demanded of his models, and for his hospitality.

Echoing his earliest works, like Funeral Scene, c. 1953, Uglow traverses the boundary between figuration and abstraction in Snow on Lambeth, 1987. Employing a restricted palette, Uglow lays out the buildings of Lambeth under snow seen in the grey light of a winter’s day through receding planes of yellow, orange and grey. Compared to the earlier Winter Sun, with its asphalt road and visible windows and doors, Uglow strips away recognisable elements of an urban scene, paring down the work to blocks of colour. The surface is smooth – brushstrokes are finely applied and barely visible and colour is mostly unmodulated – augmenting the flatness, the denial of recession. Instead a subtle interplay of geometric shapes and tonal colour constitute the subject of the work: the atmospheric snowscape becomes a vehicle for Uglow’s formal preoccupations.