LONDON.- This season’s major evening sale of Modern & Contemporary art at Sotheby’s London is set to star four extraordinary pieces by three visionaries of British Art: Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Frank Dobson. Coming to auction from a distinguished private collection, all four works were created within just a few miles of one another in London.

Lucian Freud’s naked portrait of Penelope Cuthbertson leads this exceptional group with an estimate of £8-12 million. While from a first glance, the painting appears to be simply a portrait, a closer inspection also alludes to the presence of the artist himself: the haphazard wardrobe offers a glimpse of Freud’s overcoat and boots, while the glowing reflections in the window perhaps hint subtly to Freud’s form, his brush, and his easel.

Freud’s meditative portrait will be offered alongside two remarkable paintings from Frank Auerbach’s most revered series’: Mornington Crescent, which carries the highest estimate ever placed on a work by the artist at auction (est. £3.5-4.5m), and a portrait of his most famed sitter Juliet Yardley Mills, J.Y.M. Seated II (est. £800,000-1.2m). Scraped and sculpted, its richly impastoed surface powerfully conveys the depth of Auerbach’s emotional response to his subject in a manner akin to Freud’s portrait of Cuthbertson (Night Interior).

The collection also comprises a white marble sculpture of a female form by Frank Dobson - a prominent player in the revival of ‘direct carving’ in Britain (est. £600,000-800,000). Rare to market, only ten carvings by the artist have appeared at auction in the last thirty years. Please find further information on each of the works below.

All four works will go on public view as part of Sotheby’s preview exhibitions in its New Bond Street galleries, opening on 20 June, before they are offered at auction on the evening of 27 June.

A Closer Look at the Works

Lucian Freud’s Night Interior, 1969-70 Estimate: £8-12 million

At once tender and meditative, intimate and contemplative, Lucian Freud’s Night Interior is an entrancing naked portrait of Penelope Cuthbertson, the daughter of Teresa Jungmann, one of the original Bright Young Things, grand-daughter of the artist Nico Wilhelm Jungmann, and wife of the late Desmond Guinness. Here, Cuthbertson is portrayed sitting in a chair in front of a large window - her legs dangling over its arm, her eyes shut, dreaming. She does not confront the viewer, or the artist, rather the viewer confronts her in an intimate moment of privacy.

Night Interior is one of seven painted portraits the artist created of Cuthbertson during his lifetime. They first met at a party in the late 1960s, and soon after Freud asked Cuthbertson to sit for him, creating the very first portraits of her in 1966 and a further three in 1968, before embarking on this final work in 1968-70.

Night Interior illuminates Freud’s mastery in the genre of portraiture, though his output was restricted to capturing only those closest to him. Whether self-portraits, or portraits of his children, friends, lovers, fellow artists and luminaries, Freud did not take commissions and instead chose only to paint those with a particular significance to him. He would scrutinise his sitter for hour upon hour, day upon day, as an artist notorious for taking months and even years over a particular work.

Alongside portraiture, ‘the nude’ was the other defining leitmotif of Freud’s career. Across six decades of painting, innumerable mutations of painterly style, and a multitude of sitters, he would return to this subject time and again. It was, in many ways, the greatest challenge of his career; a problem to which he never found a solution: “All portraits are difficult for me. But a nude presents different challenges. When someone is naked, there is in effect nothing to be hidden. You are stripped of your costume as it were. Not everyone wants to be that honest about themselves. That means I feel an obligation to be equally honest in how I represent their honesty. It’s a matter of responsibility. I’m not trying to be a philosopher. I’m more of a realist. I’m just trying to see and understand the people that make up my life.”

Night Interior once resided in the collection of the late Garech Domnagh Browne, cousin of Lady Caroline Blackwood, before it was acquired by Charles Saatchi and then by the present owner. The painting also has an illustrious exhibition history: it was a formative part of Freud’s first major UK travelling retrospective which began at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1974; it was included in the seminal show, Lucian Freud. L’Atelier, at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, in 2010, and six years later in the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s loan exhibition Lucian Freud (2016-2018).

Frank Auerbach, Mornington Crescent, 1969 Estimate: £3.5-4.5 million




Mornington Crescent is among Frank Auerbach’s earliest and largest painterly musings on North London. After moving to his studio in Camden Town, taking it over from Leon Kossoff in 1954, Auerbach would soon begin to explore the streets on his immediate doorstep, as well as those around Chalk Farm, Primrose Hill and Mornington Crescent, all of which carry long cultural associations: the painter Walter Sickert live there, and Charles Dickens attended a school nearby. These areas quickly became places as familiar to Auerbach as the faces of his long-standing sitters: “This part of London is my world. I’ve been wandering around these streets for so long that I have become attached to them, and as fond of them as people are of their pets.”

Painted in tandem with his inimitable portrayals of the human figure, London’s topography remained a central focus of Auerbach’s career for over half a decade, counterbalancing yet corresponding to the zoomed in focus of the studio-based recordings of his sitters. In this regard, Auerbach's dynamic landscape paintings go beyond mere landscape, instead becoming daring recreations, rather than representations, of places that resonate on a profoundly personal level with the artist.

Mornington Crescent has remained in the same private collection since it was first acquired from Marlborough Gallery in 1982, and exhibited only once on the occasion of the Royal Academy’s momentous retrospective of Auerbach’s oeuvre in 2001.

Auerbach, J.Y.M. Seated II, 1987 Estimate: £800,000-1.2 million

Portraying his most famed sitter, Frank Auerbach’s Head of J.Y.M. was painted in 1987, thirty years into the artist’s friendship with Juliet Yardley Mills, referred to by her friends simply as J.Y.M. The two formed a close bond that resulted in some of Auerbach’s most significant paintings. Mills first posed for the artist in 1956 when she was a professional model at Sidcup College of Art and continued to do so for over forty years until 1997. Every Wednesday and Sunday, J.Y.M would take two buses from her home in Southeast London to Auerbach’s studio in Camden Town. Speaking of the experience, she said: “We had a wonderful relationship because I thought the world of him and he was very fond of me. There was no sort of romance but we were close. Real friends. Sundays now I’m always miserable.”

Punctuated with swathes of yellow ochre and orange - in dramatic contrast to the outlines of black impasto which vigorously sculpt the eyes, nose, mouth and jaw - Auerbach portrays his subject sitting upright, her back firmly pressed against the back of a supporting tall Windsor chair, exuding an imposing presence within the composition.

This portrait comes to the market on the heels of Sotheby’s record-breaking sale of another of Auerbach’s most celebrated portraits of J.Y.M. for £5.6 million in October 2022. The artist is also currently the subject of a major solo exhibition, ‘Frank Auerbach: Twenty Self-Portraits’, at Hazlitt Holland gallery.

Frank Dobson, Reclining Female Figure, 1954 Estimate: £600,000-800,000

Influenced by Post-Impressionism, Frank Dobson began his artistic career as a painter, but by the 1920s had built a reputation as one of the most adventurous of British sculptors, becoming among the first in Britain to prefer direct carving of the material rather than modelling a maquette first.

Carved in white marble, Dobson created Reclining Female Figure in 1954, at age 68. From a first glance, it appears to portray a woman laid comfortably asleep, yet from a closer inspection, the figure invites multiple interpretations. It has been suggested that the subject exudes an almost child-like quality. By this stage in his life, Dobson had a six-year-old granddaughter who would often frequent his home in Kensington. At night, she was able to sleep in what the author Neville Jason described as, “the cosy little downstairs studio which Dobson normally used for modelling small terracottas in the evening”.4 Another interpretation suggests the figure carries a distinct sense of loneliness. Viewed from certain angles, her limbs appear tightly clustered as if bravely determined to protect herself from possible assault. Created in the wake of World War II, perhaps the sculpture gravely references the nightmare many fellow-Londoners underwent to escape their houses and find shelter in Underground tunnels, often sleeping on dismal platforms.

Sotheby’s set Dobson’s auction record when Female Torso sold for £2 million, over five times his previous auction record, in March 2021.

Several major public sculptures by Frank Dobson are currently on view in the UK, including London Pride, situated outside the National Theatre on London’s South Bank, and Woman with a Fish, located in the Delapre Gardens in Northampton.