Painted by Euan Uglow when he was just 26, four years after he had graduated from the Slade, Beautiful Girl Lying Down is one of the artist’s earliest, yet most accomplished female nudes.
The subject of this painting is the abstract painter Natalie (Tilly) Dower, who was Uglow’s girlfriend at the time.1 Although Paula Rego recently described Dower as: ‘the most underrated’ cultural figure, ‘practically unknown after a lifetime’s work’, 2 examples of her work reside in both the Arts Council Collection and the Government Art Collection. Painted in Dower’s bedroom in Kent, the present work portrays her reclining in the nude on her side, facing away from the viewer, a pose Uglow instructed her to adopt so that she would not be too exposed. Indeed, the artist’s affection for his girlfriend is further reflected not only in the title he assigned the painting, but in his compassionate and tender rendering of her naked body, which calls to mind Pierre Subleyras’ The Back of a Naked Lady, 1740 (coll. Barberini, Rome), a painting of his wife Maria Felice Tibaldi, and Victor Pasmore’s Reclining Nude, 1942, of his wife Wendy (coll. Tate, London).
For an artist who said, ‘I don’t see how anyone can be overperfectionist’,3 painting was an intense and incredibly lengthy process that required a great commitment from both the painter and the model, who would typically be required to sit for three hours or more, with a single portrait taking many months or even years to complete. In this case, as the painting’s date reveals, Uglow worked on Beautiful Girl Lying Down over a two year period, and we know from the artist’s accounts that Dower posed for him every weekend morning.
Uglow said, ‘Nobody has ever looked at you as intensively as I have’ 4, and indeed, in Beautiful Girl Lying Down, one gets a real sense of the penetrating analysis with which the artist approached the subject. Through innumerable, subtly-modulated fleshly tones, Uglow has ‘sculpted’ Dower’s body, conveying a real impression of the weight of her figure in space. The artist’s painstaking method of observation is evidenced by the visual remnants of numerous small marks throughout the composition that were made to determine the relationship of the subject to the proportions of the canvas and to establish the depth of the field. This was a technique inherited by Uglow from William Coldstream, who he studied under first at Camberwell School of Art from 1947 to 1950, and then at the Slade from 1951 and 1954.

1 The painting was completed shortly before Uglow and Dower broke up in 1959
2 Rego in The Art Newspaper, December 2019
3 The artist cited in Browse & Darby, Euan Uglow, 1997, exh cat
4 The artist, unpublished interview, 1989, cited in Richard Kendall, ‘Uglow at Work: the
Formative Years’, in Catherine Lampert, Euan Uglow, The Complete Paintings,
Yale University Press, New Haven, 2007, ix