A monumental charcoal drawing by Jenny Saville, Mirror (2011-12), has sold for £2,114,000, far exceeding its pre-sale estimate of £800,000–1,200,000. The most expensive drawing by Jenny Saville’s Mother (2011), a monumental pastel and charcoal work fetched £9.5 million ($12.4 million) at Sotheby’s London in October 2021.
Spanning over eight feet, Mirror intertwines multiple reclining figures, merging Old Master influences with modernist fragmentation. Saville’s dense layering of charcoal conjures movement and memory, with obscured references to Manet’s Olympia, Titian’s Venus of Urbino, and Picasso’s Nu couché à la couronne de fleurs. A mirrored self-portrait complicates the gaze, positioning the artist as both creator and subject.
Unlike her earlier impasto-laden paintings, this work foregrounds Saville’s drawing prowess—pentimenti and loose sketch lines reveal an evolving composition, offering insight into her process. “I’m fascinated by perspective as a game of space and surface,” Saville has said, “and how artists have played with harmony and balance through the reclining nude.”
The piece reflects her ongoing interrogation of art historical depictions of the female body, recontextualising them within contemporary discourse. A major solo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 2025 will further cement her influence.
Mirror exemplifies Saville’s ability to synthesise tradition and innovation, reasserting the reclining nude’s enduring resonance while challenging its patriarchal legacy. The work’s scale and layered references envelop the viewer, affirming Saville’s place among the most significant figurative artists of her generation.
The rest of the auction showed results were down. The auction totalled £62.5m—down 25% year-on-year—but Sotheby’s says it is committed to holding June sales in London despite a challenging post-Brexit market.
Other Big Ticket Items:
A small painting by Tamara de Lempicka, depicting her lover Rafaëla in the nude. La Belle Rafaëla (1927) bidding interest slowed after auctioneer Helena Newman pushed the work up to its £6m low estimate; it achieved £6.1m (£7.4m with fees), going to a buyer in the room.
Jenny Saville, Juncture (1994) hammered just below its £5m low estimate, making £5.4m with fees. This was despite her major solo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Barbara Hepworth’s pair of alabaster stone sculptures, Vertical Forms (1965, est £2m-£3m), failed to find a buyer.
Jenny Saville: Reconfiguring the Figure
Born in Cambridge in 1970 and raised in Scotland, Jenny Saville emerged in the 1990s as a defining voice in contemporary figurative painting. Her work interrogates the human body—particularly the female form—through a lens that merges art historical rigour with visceral, unflinching realism.
Educated at Glasgow School of Art, Saville’s early exposure to Renaissance masters and modernist distortions shaped her approach. A scholarship to Cincinnati in 1991 proved pivotal, immersing her in the physicality of surgical theatres and the raw materiality of flesh. This period solidified her preoccupation with corporeal presence, weight, and the boundaries of traditional beauty.
By her mid-twenties, Saville was championed by Charles Saatchi and became synonymous with the Young British Artists (YBAs), though her practice diverged from their conceptual tendencies. Instead, she pursued a painterly reinvestigation of the figure, drawing equally from Titian’s voluptuous nudes, de Kooning’s frenetic brushwork, and Bacon’s psychological intensity. Her monumental canvases—often self-portraits or studies of non-idealised bodies—challenge conventions of scale and gaze, rendering flesh as both subject and landscape.
Notable works, such as Propped (1992) and Reverse (2002-03), confront viewers with distorted, sprawling anatomies, while her charcoal drawings, including Mirror (2011-12), reveal a palimpsest of art historical references. Saville’s marks—whether thick oil impasto or smudged graphite—oscillate between precision and dissolution, mirroring the instability of bodily perception.
Beyond the studio, her influence extends to curatorial projects and academic discourse. A 2018 retrospective at Oxford’s Modern Art Oxford and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art underscored her impact, while her 2025 exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery reassessed her contributions to portraiture.
Saville’s practice remains rooted in paradox: tradition and disruption, vulnerability and power, the grotesque and the sublime. By relentlessly reworking the figure, she not only reclaims it from patriarchal art history but also asserts painting’s enduring capacity to unsettle and transcend.
Title: Mirror (2011-12) Medium: Charcoal on paper Sale Price: £2,114,000 (record for a living artist’s work on paper) Exhibition: National Portrait Gallery, London (June 2025)