Frank Auerbach’s Portraits of London

‘I feel London is this raw thing ... This extraordinary, marvellously unpainted city,’ Frank Auerbach said in 1990.

Auerbach’s North London studio opened to the leafy streets of Camden Town and Mornington Crescent. There, the famously private artist painted 365 days a year, often sleeping on site and waking at sunrise to paint the same subjects. A quarter of his oeuvre was devoted to urban landscapes—notably, the pavements, parks, and canals that he paced in the city he called home.

This month, Offer Waterman and Francis Outred present Frank Auerbach: Portraits of London (4 October–7 December 2024), the first survey dedicated to the artist’s London landscapes, uniting a group of 25 oil paintings borrowed from British museums and private collections.

Familiar sights within the city—including the bustle of Oxford Street, the sweeping panoramas of Hampstead Heath, and the quiet North London neighbourhood of Mornington Crescent—captured during London’s recovery from war, trace the English capital’s flourishing into a major metropolis at the turn of the 21st century.

Auerbach painted Primrose Hill—his favourite London park—over 40 times between 1954 and the late 1980s, in different seasons and times of the day. On view for the first time at Offer Waterman is Primrose Hill, Hot Summer Evening (1974–1975), a painting he fought to include in a major retrospective at Hayward Gallery in London in 1978, but to no avail.

Across town, the Courtauld are celebrating London with Monet and London. Views of the Thames (27 September 2024–19 January 2025), an exhibition of an extraordinary group of Claude Monet‘s Impressionist paintings of the city, capturing the River Thames and its surrounding architecture.

Main image: Exhibition view: Frank Auerbach, Portraits of London (Francis Outred | Offer Waterman), Offer Waterman, London (4 October–7 December 2024). Courtesy Offer Waterman. Photo by Prudence Cuming Associates.