Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., London
Marlborough Gallery, New York
Rex Irwin, Sydney
Galerie Michael Haas, Berlin

William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York 2009, p. 317, no. 691, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the red is brighter in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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Executed in 1992, Julia Seated II is a portrait of Auerbach's wife, Julia Wolstenholme, whom he married in 1958. Shown seated in a loosely defined space, Julia has all the hallmarks of a classic Auerbach painting. Striking and intimate, Julia shirks figurative representation and conveys🍰 something more compelling and more private. More than with any other of his sitters, the paintings of Julia verify the reasons behind his unwavering, continued commitment to paint only the people closest to him. They represent the inner core of Auerbach's close relationships with models and convey a feeling of substance and🔯 sensuality that only comes from absolute familiarity.  

In a manner akin to de Kooning's paintings of women, Auerbach's visual language reveals the psychological expression of the artist as much as the sitter. The brushmarks defining her seated form are built in thick layers of pigment, the strokes of sapphire blue, plum and caramel conveying everything but a visual reality. There is a sense of revelatory directness in the way he paints his wife here, channelling the visual impetus of the situation and enlivening it through the palpable emotions of their interaction. "There was always the feeling that she might get fed up, that there might be a quarrel or something. I also had a much greater sense of specifically what she was like, so that the question of getting a likeness was like walking a tightrope. I had a far more poignant sense of it slipping away, of it being hard to get" (the artist in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Royal Academy of Arts, Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, 2001, p. 23).