Biography

Euan Uglow was born 10 March 1932 in London and as a child lived in Tulse Hill

Tulse Hill

Tulse Hill is a district in the London Borough of Lambeth in South London, England. It lies to the south of Brixton, east of Brixton Hill, north of West Norwood and west of West Dulwich.-History:...

 in south London. His father was an accountant, and Uglow went to the local grammar school in Tulse Hill, called Strand School

Strand School

Strand School was a boys' grammar school in the Tulse Hill area of South London. It moved there in 1913 from its original location in the Strand...

. Afterwards he studied at Camberwell School of Art from 1948 to 1950. This was a time when Camberwell students studied under some of its most distinguished artists of the time, including Victor Pasmore

Victor Pasmore

Edwin John Victor Pasmore was a British artist and architect. He pioneered the development of abstract art in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s.-Biography:...

, Lawrence Gowing

Lawrence Gowing

Sir Lawrence Gowing was a British artist, writer, curator and teacher. Initially recognized as a portrait and landscape painter, he quickly rose to prominence as an art educator, writer, and eventually, curator and museum trustee...

, John Minton

John Minton

John Minton may refer to:* John D. Minton, Jr., Chief Justice of the Kentucky Supreme Court* John Minton , artist and illustrator* Big John Studd , wrestler...

, Kenneth Martin

Kenneth Martin

Kenneth Martin was an English painter and sculptor who along with his wife Mary Martin and Victor Pasmore was a leading figure in the revival of Constructivism in Britain and America in the 1940s....

 and William Coldstream

William Coldstream

Sir William Menzies Coldstream was a British realist painter and a long standing art teacher.-Biography:...

. It is debateable whether Uglow fell most under the influence of Coldstream whilst at Camberwell, and this is certainly the dominant view, although Uglow himself believed it was another tutor there, the painter Claude Rogers, was more significant in his development. Nonetheless when Coldstream left Camberwell to teach at the Slade School of Art in 1951 Uglow followed him, and remained a student at the Slade until 1954.

Refusing compulsory military service, Uglow was classified as a conscientious objector in 1954, and spent two years undertaking compulsory community work, assisting in the restoration of a war damaged church by Christopher Wren

Christopher Wren

Sir Christopher Wren FRS is one of the most highly acclaimed English architects in history.He used to be accorded responsibility for rebuilding 51 churches in the City of London after the Great Fire in 1666, including his masterpiece, St. Paul's Cathedral, on Ludgate Hill, completed in 1710...

 in the City of London, redecorating the house of the artist Patrick George and helping on a farm in Surrey.

Success in art was not immediate, and he did not sell a painting until eight years after leaving art school. During this time he took on a variety of part time teaching jobs, most notably at the Slade from 1961, an institution with which he was to be associated for the rest of his life.

In 1962 he was at the centre of a storm at the municipal art gallery in Bradford

Bradford

Bradford lies at the heart of the City of Bradford, a metropolitan borough of West Yorkshire, in Northern England. It is situated in the foothills of the Pennines, west of Leeds, and northwest of Wakefield. Bradford became a municipal borough in 1847, and received its charter as a city in 1897...

, Yorkshire

Yorkshire

Yorkshire is a historic county of northern England and the largest in the United Kingdom. Because of its great size in comparison to other English counties, functions have been increasingly undertaken over time by its subdivisions, which have also been subject to periodic reform...

, when a local councillor, Horace Hird, had one of Uglow's paintings, German Girl, removed from an Arts Council

Arts council

An arts council is a government or private, non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the arts mainly by funding local artists, awarding prizes, and organizing events at home and abroad...

 exhibition at the gallery. Hird claimed the painting 'offended decency'.

Despite this Uglow was generally a shy artist who shunned publicity as well as honours, including an offer to become a member of the Royal Academy in 1961. However he did become a trustee of the National Gallery in London, in 1991, although in his own words he was generally ignored by the other trustees.

Uglow's first solo show was in 1961 at the Beaux Arts Gallery, but his slow and methodical working method did not lead to a large number of solo shows. In 1969 he exhibited drawings at the Gardener Centre at Sussex University, in 1974 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London and then periodically at the Browse & Darby Gallery in London. He did take part in numerous group shows, however, including exhibitions of the London Group and the annual John Moores Prize exhibitions in Liverpool. In 1981 he took part in the exhibition Eight Figurative Painters at the University of Yale Center for British Art

Yale Center for British Art

The Yale Center for British Art is an art museum in New Haven, Connecticut at Yale University which houses the most comprehensive collection of British Art outside the United Kingdom...

 in New Haven, USA, and in 1984 in The Hard Won Image at the Tate Gallery, London. In 1992 he featured in the exhibition British Figurative Painting of the 20th Century at the Israel Museum

Israel Museum

The Israel Museum, Jerusalem was founded in 1965 as Israel's national museum. It is situated on a hill in the Givat Ram neighborhood of Jerusalem, near the Bible Lands Museum, the Knesset, the Israeli Supreme Court, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem....

 in Jerusalem, and in 2000 in the exhibition Encounters at the National Gallery in London. In 2002 a posthumous retrospective was organised by the Arts Council for England, entitled Spotlight on Euan Uglow, which toured around Britain. In 2003 there was a retrospective Euan Uglow: Controlled Passion, Fifty Years of Painting at the Abbot Hall Gallery, in Kendal.

In 1980 Uglow was invited by the artist Stass Paraskos

Stass Paraskos

Stass Paraskos is an artist from Cyprus, although much of his life was spent teaching and working in England.-Early life:Paraskos was born in Anaphotia, on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus in 1933, the son of a shepherd farmer. He went to England in 1953 and became a cook in his brother's...

 to become the first artist-in-residence at the new Cyprus College of Art

Cyprus College of Art

The Cyprus College of Art is a post-secondary art instutution located in the Mediterranean island of, Cyprus.-Academics:CyCA offers beginner courses in art, university-entrance programmes in art and design, bachelor degree equivalent programmes in Fine Art , and Master of Fine Art degrees at...

 arts centre in village of Lempa on the island of Cyprus

Cyprus

Cyprus , officially the Republic of Cyprus , is a Eurasian island country, member of the European Union, in the Eastern Mediterranean, east of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria and north of Egypt. It is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea.The earliest known human activity on the...

.

He has work in the collections of the Arts Council of England, the British Council, the National Museum of Wales, the Ferens Art Gallery

Ferens Art Gallery

The Ferens Art Gallery is an art gallery in the English city of Kingston upon Hull. The site and money for the gallery were donated to the city by Thomas Ferens, after whom it is named. Opened in 1927,...

 in Hull, Glasgow Art Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...

 in New York, Southampton City Art Gallery

Southampton City Art Gallery

The Southampton City Art Gallery is an art gallery in Southampton, southern England. It is located in the Civic Centre on Commercial Road.The gallery's art collection covers six centuries of European art history, with over 3,500 works. It is housed in an example of 1930s municipal architecture...

, the British Government Art Collection, the Tate Gallery and The Hepworth in Wakefield.

Uglow died of liver cancer at his home in Wandsworth, London on 31 August 2000.

The Estate of Uglow is represented by Marlborough Fine Art, London.

Style and Influences

Uglow was predominantly a painter of the human figure, although he also painted still lives and landscapes. His method was meticulous, involving a great deal of measuring and correction to create images that are not hyper real, but almost sculptural in the care and attention that went into putting them together. The measuring process was laborious and time consuming to the point that Uglow himself joked that one model he began painting when she was engaged, was still painting when she got married and did not finish painting until she was divorced.

As this indicates Uglow worked directly from life, and one of the features of his paintings was that he did not attempt to hide the process of construction. Remnants of the measurements he took and the drawing guide he used remain visible in the finished paintings. This was a process that Uglow developed from his early studies under William Colstream, and it was to become a mainstay of teaching at the Slade School of Art in London tying into an already longstanding emphasis on drawing there. The result was paintings that had a strong sculptural quality, but within the tradition of the shallow picture plane of modernism, particularly as it was understood by Cézanne

Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th...

, although Uglow's work has also been compared to the simple classicism of the Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca

Piero della Francesca

Piero della Francesca was a painter of the Early Renaissance. As testified by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Artists, to contemporaries he was also known as a mathematician and geometer. Nowadays Piero della Francesca is chiefly appreciated for his art. His painting was characterized by its...

 particularly for the way he would make his life models pose in ways to emphasise simple geometric shapes. Planes are articulated very precisely, edges are sharply defined, and colours are differentiated with great subtlety.

Uglow preferred that his canvas be a square

Square (geometry)

In geometry, a square is a regular quadrilateral. This means that it has four equal sides and four equal angles...

, a golden rectangle, or a rectangle of exact root

Square root

In mathematics, a square root of a number x is a number r such that r2 = x, or, in other words, a number r whose square is x...

 value, as is the case with the Root Five Nude (1976). He then carried out careful measurements at every stage of painting, a method Coldstream had imparted to him and which is identified with the painters of the Euston Road School

Euston Road School

The Euston Road School was a group of English painters, active in London between 1937 and 1939.William Coldstream, Victor Pasmore, Claude Rogers, Maurice Field and Graham Bell set up a School of Drawing and Painting in Euston Road in 1937; other associated artists included Lawrence Gowing, Tom...

. Standing before the subject to be painted, Uglow registered measurements by means of a metal instrument of his own design (derived from a modified music stand); with one eye closed and with the arm of the instrument against his cheek, keeping the calibrations at a constant distance from the eye, the artist could take the measure of an object or interval to compare against other objects or intervals he saw before him. Such empirical measurements enable an artist to paint what the eye sees without the use of conventional perspective

Perspective (graphical)

Perspective in the graphic arts, such as drawing, is an approximate representation, on a flat surface , of an image as it is seen by the eye...

. The surfaces of Uglow's paintings carry many small horizontal and vertical markings, where he recorded these coordinates so that they could be verified against reality.

Colour was fundamental to his understanding, and painters such as Matisse

Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...

 and the Venetians

Italian Renaissance painting

Italian Renaissance painting is the painting of the period beginning in the late 13th century and flourishing from the early 15th to late 16th centuries, occurring within the area of present-day Italy, which was at that time divided into many political areas...

 influenced him all his artistic life along with many others, although perhaps Cézanne, Morandi

Giorgio Morandi

Giorgio Morandi was an Italian painter and printmaker who specialized in still life. His paintings are noted for their tonal subtlety in depicting apparently simple subjects, which were limited mainly to vases, bottles, bowls, flowers, and landscapes.-Biography:Giorgio Morandi was born in Bologna...

, Poussin

Nicolas Poussin

Nicolas Poussin was a French painter in the classical style. His work predominantly features clarity, logic, and order, and favors line over color. His work serves as an alternative to the dominant Baroque style of the 17th century...

 and Ingres

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he considered himself to be a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was Ingres's portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest...

 were closest to his heart. Uglow described to an interviewer the inspiration for his still life Lemon (1973):

I'll tell you what Lemon is about ... It's the dome at Volterra that Brunelleschi

Filippo Brunelleschi

Filippo Brunelleschi was one of the foremost architects and engineers of the Italian Renaissance. He is perhaps most famous for inventing linear perspective and designing the dome of the Florence Cathedral, but his accomplishments also included bronze artwork, architecture , mathematics,...

 was supposed to have helped with. It's most beautiful, very simple, very lovely. I couldn't paint the dome there, so when I came back I thought I'd try to paint it from a lemon.

Zagi (1981–82), which depicts a standing nude, was inspired by a children's toy of an acrobat, with the word Zagi itself being Chinese for acrobat.

Uglow's paintings made whilst he was an artist-in-residence at the Cyprus College of Art

Cyprus College of Art

The Cyprus College of Art is a post-secondary art instutution located in the Mediterranean island of, Cyprus.-Academics:CyCA offers beginner courses in art, university-entrance programmes in art and design, bachelor degree equivalent programmes in Fine Art , and Master of Fine Art degrees at...

 in 1980 and again in 1983 are almost wholly landscapes, and he used the clear summer skies of Cyprus as a stark contrast of flat colour against the geometrical and sculptural forms he painted at ground level. But Uglow was also well travelled to other countries, spending six months in Italy on a Prix de Rome

Prix de Rome

The Prix de Rome was a scholarship for arts students, principally of painting, sculpture, and architecture. It was created, initially for painters and sculptors, in 1663 in France during the reign of Louis XIV. It was an annual bursary for promising artists having proved their talents by...

 scholarship in 1953, and later making work in France, Spain, Morocco, Turkey, India and China.

One of the most notable paintings made by Uglow was a nude painting of Cherie Blair

Cherie Blair

Cherie Blair , known professionally as Cherie Booth QC, is a British barrister working in the legal system of England and Wales. She is married to the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Tony Blair; the couple have three sons and one daughter...

, wife of the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair

Tony Blair

Anthony Charles Lynton Blair is a former British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to 27 June 2007. He was the Member of Parliament for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007...

left unfinished in 1978. Art critic Frank Whitford, writing in The Sunday Times has jokingly suggested Uglow made such an impression on the young Cherie that 30 years later the Blairs named their son after him.

Further reading

• Catherine Lampert, Euan Uglow (London: Browse and Darby, 1997)

• Catherine Lampert and Richard Kendall, Euan Uglow: the complete paintings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)

• Susan Campbell (ed.), Euan Uglow : some memories of the painter (London: Browse and Darby, and the Sheepdrove Trust, 2003)

External links

• Marlborough Art Gallery, artists' page