“I haven’t painted [Mornington Crescent] to ally myself with some Camden Town Group, but simply because I feel London is this raw thing ... This extraordinary, marvellously unpainted city where whenever somebody tries to get something going, they stop halfway through, and next to it something incongruous occurs ... this higgledy-piggledy mess of a city.”
—Frank AuerbachThe subject matter of Frank Auerbach’s early paintings sees a continual depiction of post-war London, a destroyed city the artist captured through his semi-figurative style, characterised by strong brushstrokes and an impasto effect. Familiar scenes for Auerbach such as Mornington Crescent – the site of his North London studio from 1954 onwards are key subjects for the artist – as he consistently painted a “world full of atmospheric reality: a small corner of London which is his own arena”.i Two Studies are a precursory work to his fully realised painting of the same year, with both works revealing an intimate insight into the everyday scenes of the artist’s life, alongside his practice of using preliminary site sketches as templates for his final paintings. The formal features of Two Studies and the final Morning Crescent painting also showcase the “balance of objective depiction and emotional realism” within his work, with this combination of depicting everyday scenes through expressive brushstrokes being a defining feature of his work.ii
