Maggi Hambling (British, born 1945) Self-portrait signed and dated 'Hambling./7.9.73.' (lower right) pencil 17.5 x 13 cm. (6 7/8 x 5 1/8 in.) Footnotes: Provenance The Artist, from whom acquired by Véra Russell Maggi Hambling's creative output is characterised by an extraordinary sense of immediacy. Across more than five decades, she has moved between portraiture, still life, landscape and the sea, working all manner of mediums, yet her approach has remained instinctively responsive to her subject. She has resisted attempts to define her practice too neatly: ''Portraitist', 'Expressionist'. I don't like those 'ist' words. I'm not an 'ist'.' Instead, Hambling's work is perhaps best understood through her own description of the relationship between artist and art: 'You must make your work your best friend, that you can go to it whatever you're feeling... and go to your work and have a conversation with it. And that's how I've lived my life.' Born in Suffolk in 1945, Hambling's artistic education began at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, founded by Cedric Morris and Lett Haines, before she went on to study at Ipswich, Camberwell and the Slade Schools of Art. Haines's emphasis on experimentation proved formative. 'Everything has to be an experiment, otherwise it's dead,' Hambling has recalled, a principle that can be seen throughout the works presented here, where observation is continually transformed through gesture, colour and memory. Her earliest work in the present selection, Lot 50, Self-portrait (1973), offers an intimate glimpse of the young artist. Executed in pencil, its economy contrasts with the forceful handling of her later paintings, but the directness of the image already points towards an enduring preoccupation with the human subject. Portraiture would remain a central part of Hambling's practice, encompassing both intimate personal relationships and encounters with figures of public significance. Lot 53, Max's Egg (1982), is the largest and earliest oil painting in the present selection and provides an important insight into Hambling's practice at the beginning of the 1980s. The work was exhibited the following year at the National Portrait Gallery in Max Wall: Pictures by Maggi Hambling, an exhibition devoted to her work relating to the celebrated comedian. Rather than presenting Wall as a conventional sitter, Hambling fills the canvas with the objects and paraphernalia of her surroundings, creating a richly observed and highly personal composition. Among these details is a robin on the mantelpiece, which was a Christmas card given to the artist by Wall. The work demonstrates the distinctive way in which Hambling could allow the people and experiences around her to enter her paintings, sometimes directly and sometimes through the objects, spaces and memories associated with them. This interest in the personal dimension of portraiture is also evident in Lot 52, Sebastian, 3 (2010), a portrait of Hambling's friend Sebastian Horsley, painted in the year of his death. The portrait belongs to a sustained body of work recording those close to her, and reflects the particular intimacy she associates with the act of painting another person. As she has observed, 'To paint a portrait, it's a bit like a love affair, I mean, because it's a very intense thing, and at the end of it you hope ... a decent painting will come out of it, and not a broken heart.' Untitled (portrait) painted in 2018 (Lot 51) demonstrates that fascination with the figure continuing into a later phase of her career, its concentrated scale allowing the expressive handling of paint to carry the image. Alongside portraiture, the landscape - and particularly the Suffolk coast - has been a lifelong source of inspiration. Lot 54, Suffolk Sunrise (1988), captures the East Anglian landscape in watercolour, while Sun Thief (Lot 57) and Moon Thief (Lot 58), both dated 1990, move beyond straightforward observation towards a more imaginative conception of the natural world. Their titles themselves suggest Hambling's tendency to animate elements of the landscape, treating the sun and moon as active, almost tangible presences. The sea, however, has become perhaps the most enduring subject of Hambling's later work. Her connection to the North Sea is rooted in the Suffolk landscape in which she grew up, but it is not simply a matter of place. Hambling has described how, after witnessing a violent storm on the coast in 2002, she returned to her studio and found that the experience had overtaken the subject she had intended to paint. Working on a small portrait from memory, 'what was inside me, what had actually entered me that day was this storm'. She transformed the painting into her first small sea painting, recalling: 'the North Sea has still got me, has me by the short and curlies.' Lots 55 and 56, Seaweed Tossed in a Wave I (2003) and Dissolving Summer Wave (2006-07), belong to this ongoing engagement with the sea. In these jewel-like canvases, the physical act of painting becomes inseparable from the movement of the subject: waves surge, break and dissolve through energetic, gestural marks. Hambling has described the sea as 'a metaphor for life and death and recycling', while also acknowledging its sensuality and erotic energy. The resulting paintings occupy a space between representation and abstraction, where the observed world becomes a vehicle for sensation and emotion. Taken together, the works in this selection reveal the breadth of Hambling's practice while also demonstrating the consistency that lies at its heart. Whether looking at herself, a friend, a celebrated performer, a sunrise or the breaking sea, she approaches her subject as something to be experienced rather than merely recorded. Her paintings combine reality with sensation and feeling, transforming the immediacy of looking into an act of physical and emotional response. Across five decades, Hambling has continued to treat painting as an experiment and a conversation; one that remains, above all, intensely alive. Quotations from Maggi Hambling are taken from 'Brilliant Ideas | Maggi Hambling | The Energy of the Sea', video interview with the artist. 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