‘Viewed obliquely Boehm’s diamond-shaped cranium and handsome features invite trust, but if we look again, from another vantage point, we see a beseeching, pinched carapace, and then a subdued gamine, gently dozing.’ 1 Gerda Boehm is Auerbach’s older cousin, and his last living relative. He painted Gerda between the years 1961 and 1982. These paintings were often painted in close proximity, and in silence, reflecting his intimate relationship with the sitter. ‘Like de Kooning’s women, Auerbach’s are almost unrecognisable to us as individuals and suggest that the intimate emotional involvement he had with his sitters somehow makes them less, rather than more, recognisable; private, even abstracted. Perhaps they are only fully recognisable to the artist himself. The senses they convey include everything but precise visual reality. It is not always possible to distinguish between Rembrandt’s Saskia and Hendrickje, for they are projections of his image of womanhood.’2 In Gerda Boehm (Leaning on her Hand), Auerbach has utilised an ossature of black lines to form a likeness of the sitter. They delineate the outer edges of Gerda’s face, tracing her eyes, nose, mouth, direction of arms and the tilt of her chin. These wet black lines are applied last of all, sinking into the underlying layers of wet colour, while simultaneously absorbing colours into them, or displanting pigment to either side. Auerbach’s relish in the expressionistic qualities of paint is showcased here. In contrast to his earlier paintings, in which the paint surface is built up to a thick accretion, this portrait demonstrates quite the opposite. In his later works Auerbach has preferred to start each studio sitting by filing down the paint layers that had been applied the previous day. 1 Royal Academy of Arts exhibition catalogue, Frank Auerbach, September–December 2001, p27 2 ibid. p15