EUAN UGLOW | THE LIGHTEST PAINTING ON EARTH

Browse and Darby, London

E. Harris

Browse and Darby, London, where acquired by the present owners, 25th October 1995

Robert Bedlow, 'Aitchison Wins £30,000 Jerwood Painting Prize', Daily Telegraph, 22nd September 1994, illustrated;  

Browse & Darby, Euan Uglow: A Selection of 111 Paintings and Two Drawings, London, 1998, illustrated;

Catherine Lampert, Euan Uglow, The Complete Paintings, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, cat. no.347, illustrated p.170;

Humphrey Ocean, 'Sculpture in Painting, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds', Financial Times, 1st November 2009. 

‘It is about high daylight. There was so much light coming and she was so pale that she absorbed the light and just threw it off. I couldn’t make anything lighter unless you made everything black and that’s not the point at all’

(Euan Uglow, 4^th June 2000, quoted in Catherine Lampert, Euan Uglow, The Complete Paintings, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p.170)

We are grateful to Catherine Lampert for her kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work. 

Euan Uglow is an artist inextricably linked with the idea of the human form, and alongside contemporaries such as Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach must be recognised as one of the past century’s most accomplished and important figurative painters. The subject of a recent retrospective at the MORE Museum in the Netherlands (in which the present work was featured), Uglow trained first at Camberwell School of Art, before moving to the Slade in 1951. Here he was taught by William Coldstream, Victor Pasmore and Claude Rogers – all of whom were to have a profound impact over the development of his artistic approach. Whilst at the Slade ‘measuring was going around’ as Uglow said of the ‘straight painting’ technique employed by Rogers and many of his students (Euan Uglow, quoted in Martin Golding ‘Euan Uglow’s Nudes’, Euan Uglow, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1989, p.11). This process involved holding out one’s paint brush at arm’s length to check and record coordinates, positioning and perspectives before marking down on the canvas. This painstaking, meticulous approach allowed Uglow to capture and record everything the eye observed and became in turn a direct physical recording of the sitting process.

Uglow’s work was profoundly influenced by Early Renaissance painting, and in particular the fresco paintings of Giotto and Masaccio. Their work influenced his adoption of his favoured blue – a colour that would become indelibly associated with the best of his paintings from the 1980s onwards (as seen in Striding Figure, 1975, sold in these rooms 20^th November 2018, lot 19). Coming from the commercial bleach powder Reckitt’s Blue, Uglow rubbed the pigment directly onto the wet plaster of the studio wall in front of which he would position his sitter. The background colour captivated the artist through its reflection of light in the studio – which became even more abundant following the fitting of a Velux window skylight in 1986. This abundance of light would influence the present work, titled The Lightest Painting on Earth. A captivating masterpiece, the painting displays the almost translucent quality of the sitter’s skin, set against the cornflower blue background. In his review of the 2009 Henry Moore Institute exhibition in which the present work was included, artist Humphrey Ocean comments of the present work: ‘Near the Titian is a Euan Uglow. There is no sculpture in it and there does not need to be. Although different in temperament to the Scholz, the naked woman in dabs of thin paint in “The Lightest Painting on Earth” is a becoming presence.' Creating a moment of utter clam and tranquility, this is a painting that also showcases Uglow’s brilliant and unrivalled understanding of the rendering of the female form.