Monumental in scale and utterly captivating in appearance, Mirror from 2011-12 is an exceptional example of Jenny Saville’s exquisite corpus of charcoal drawings. Expanding over eight feet across, multiple reclining figures are intertwined against a backdrop that evokes both Old Master painting and the modernism of Pablo Picasso. Richly layering canonical references, self-portraiture, and wholly original mark-making, this work encapsulates the very best hallmarks of Saville’s inimitable practice and re-asserts the continued relevance of one of art history’s most iconic themes: the reclining nude. Her use of charcoal allows her to pile forms on top of and in between one another, building up the image through the masterful use of line and tone, each successive pent.mes nto evoking the nature of t.mes .

Different from the thick impasto of her earlier paintings, here Saville’s virtuosic draftsmanship comes to the fore, her densely worked surface suggesting movement and memory, allowing the viewer to perceive many things at once. Amidst entwined bodies, the obscured faces of famous female nudes gaze outward: Manet’s Olympia, Titian’s Venus of Urbino, and Picasso’s Nu couché à la couronne de fleurs merge and elide. Facing opposite, another figure gazes out at us; resembling the artist, her face is doubled, or mirrored, as the title suggests, presenting the artist herself as both subject and object, artist and model. Loose sketch-lines – earlier poses dissolved but not erased – suggest an echo or shifting of the body, offering an enthralling glimpse inside the working process of one of her generation’s most celebrated portraitists. Test.mes nt to the artist’s importance, Saville will be the subject of a major museum exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery in June 2025, cementing her legacy as one of the foremost artists of the last century.

In its wealth of references, Mirror can be seen as an investigation of the history of the reclining nude. “In these pieces, I'm trying to get simultaneous realities to exist in the same image,” the artist explained. “The contradiction of a drawing on top of a drawing replicates the slippage we have between the real world and the screen world. But it's about the memory of pictures, too” (the artist quoted in Rachel Cooke, “Jenny Saville: ‘I want to be a painter of modern life, and modern bodies’,” The Guardian, 9 June 2012, online). Here, the surfeit of limbs, torsos, and faces suggests the temporal and spatial layering of experience which has become central to the way we see and live today. Tension is built in the artist’s visible adjustment of form, which evokes moving bodies bound together, holding and being held by one another. As she expressed, “I'm fascinated about the way perspective is a game of space and surface, and how artists have played that game, trying to find harmony and balance, through the figure of the reclining nude” (Ibid.). Saville’s focus on the reclining nude conceptually dovetails with the artist’s abiding preoccupation with the human body, particularly the female body. In the artist's studio, live models, found images, and the artist's own photographs merge and elide into the imagined figure on the right of the present composition; this figure acts as a contemporary "mirror" to the nudes that have come before her, contrasting the “real” with those idealised visions of feminine beauty. The mirror is a recurrent motif in Saville’s work, appearing both literally and figuratively in masterworks such as Propped (1992) and Reflective Flesh (2003); here, however, it reflects not the artist’s own form but the work of painterly masters before her, thus constructing a potent dialogue between subject and author, past and present, real and imagined.

Much of this bodily resonance is drawn from a wealth of art historical precedents. Within Mirror we recognise several figures: the face, neck ribbon, and bracelet of Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863, Musée d'Orsay, Paris) are superimposed with the profile, rounded belly, and clutched flowers of Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1534, Uffizi, Florence), amidst other figures; meanwhile, the Arcadian setting of Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus (1510, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden) is juxtaposed with the modern Cubism of Pablo Picasso’s Nu couché à la couronne de fleurs (1970, private collects ion), which is inserted as a canvas leaning against the wall behind the figure on the right. Beyond these visible references, the influence of several of Saville’s artistic heroes is vociferously redolent. The fluid, palimpsestic lines and erasures drawn from Willem de Kooning are heightened by the fractured, raw distortion taken from Francis Bacon; the ease with which the figures’ solid, fleshy forms seem to evaporate into airier, non-figurative lines and shadows reflect the influence of both. Often citing de Kooning’s Woman series as a source of inspiration, Saville has said of her works from this period that in them she “made a body that was too big for the frame, literally too big for the frame of art history… I wanted them to confront you and exist” (the artist quoted in Simon Schama, Jenny Saville, New York 2005, p. 127). This comparison is underscored by the present work’s enormity: the intimacy or vulnerability typically conferred on nude figures is here belied by their immense scale, sprawling over eight feet in length. Thus, works such as Mirror take on epic proportions; they draw us in, envelop us, before returning us back to the world, enlightened and implicated all the same.

Thus, in Saville’s masterful grasp, the history of the reclining nude is made vitally new. Reckoning with a vast patriarchal precedent of the female body under the male gaze, Saville re-examines these figures to reflect upon and ultimately challenge what has come before. In so doing, she also asserts her own creative legacy into the artistic canon and declares herself equal to the titans of centuries past. Rendered with the full force of Saville’s lyrical draftsmanship and exquisite compositional command, Mirror profoundly attests to her sublime skill, rivalling or surpassing any of her predecessors.