British figurative artist Jenny Saville has spent her career reshaping how the human body is seen. Her early paintings, built up in thick layers of oil, captured flesh at its most unfiltered – bruised, overweight, marked, or in flux – challenging traditional ideals of beauty in Western art.
Once the most expensive female artist at auction, Saville has in recent years increasingly turned to charcoal – a medium that offers speed and spontaneity – especially since becoming a mother. One of these drawings, Mirror (2011-12), recently set a new auction record for a work on paper by the artist, selling for £2.11 million (US$2.7 million) at Sotheby’s London. Measuring more than 1.5 by 2 metres, it reimagines one of art history’s most iconic motifs – the reclining nude – drawing on visual references from Titian to Manet and Picasso.
The sale coincides with a major retrospective at London’s National Portrait Gallery, Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting. On view through 7 September, the exhibition brings together 45 works tracing her evolving approach to the human figure – from early oils to recent charcoals – and offers a rare look at a painter still redefining how the body is depicted.
Jenny Seville
Lot 7 | Jenny Saville (b. 1970) | Mirror, charcoal on paper (Auction record for a work on paper by the artist)
Executed in 2011-12
152.4 x 215.5 cm
Provenance:
- Gagosian Gallery, New York
- Private Collection, Palm Beach (acquired from the above in 2012)
- Gagosian Gallery, New York
- Acquired from the above in 2016 by the present owner
Estimate: £800,000 - 1,200,000
Hammer Price: £1,700,000
Sold: £2,114,000
Auction House: Sotheby's New York
Sale: Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction
Date: 25 June 2025
Born in Cambridge in 1970, Jenny Saville always knew she wanted to be a serious painter – one grounded in the grand tradition of Western art. She pursued her formal education at the Glasgow School of Art, but quickly realised that the history she admired had largely excluded women.
The discovery was destabilising. For a time, Saville gave up painting altogether and turned to photography and casting. But the shift didn’t sit right. "I literally felt homesick in my body," she later recalled.
A six-month scholarship at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio changed her mind, fortunately. There, she encountered feminist theory for the first time – frameworks that revealed the marginalisation of female voices not only in art history, but across culture more broadly.
“Between traditional art history and more feminist theory,” she said, “I went from thinking it was a weakness to realizing it was a strength. I had no choice. It was my language.” She returned to the studio with renewed purpose, determined to carve out space for female subjectivity within the very traditions she had once questioned.
Jenny Seville
Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting is on view at London’s National Portrait Gallery through 7 September
Throughout the 1990s, Saville focused on the unairbrushed human form. Declaring herself “anti-beauty,” she exaggerated bodily features society typically deemed unsightly – challenging both traditional representations of the nude and the idealised bodies perpetuated by mass media.
Her fascination with flesh began early. As a child, she was captivated by her piano teacher’s body – the way her breasts merged, the movement of her fat, how it hung from the backs of her arms. Later, while living in the United States, she encountered a broader range of body types, particularly the “big white flesh in shorts and T-shirts,” which deepened her interest in raw physicality.
In the mid-1990s, Saville spent long hours observing plastic surgery in New York, including liposuction, trauma corrections, and gender-affirming procedures. Witnessing firsthand how flesh could be cut, reshaped, and manipulated offered her a modern way to think about anatomy – an experience she likened to moving paint across canvas.
Trace (1993-4) | On view at London’s National Portrait Gallery through 7 September
Reverse (2002-3) | On view at London’s National Portrait Gallery through 7 September
Her breakthrough came when Charles Saatchi, founder of London’s Saatchi Gallery and a key figure behind the Young British Artists (YBA) movement, saw her painting Propped on the cover of the Times Saturday Review. At the time, Saville had just completed her undergraduate degree and was preparing to begin postgraduate studies.
Deeply impressed, Saatchi bought all her available works and offered her an 18-month contract to produce new pieces for his gallery in London. In 1994, he exhibited five of her new paintings alongside earlier works like Propped, Branded, and Prop, launching her into the spotlight.
In 2018, Propped sold for £9.53 million (US$12.4 million) at Sotheby’s London, making Saville the most expensive living female artist at the time – a record only recently broken by Marlene Dumas’s Miss January, which sold for US$13.6 million at Christie’s New York.
Propped | Sold for £9.53 million at Sotheby’s London in 2018
Marlene Dumas | Miss January | Sold for US$13.6 million at Christie’s New York in 2025
For decades, Saville rendered distorted bodies in thick, expressive brushwork. But after the births of her two children in 2007 and 2008, her practice shifted.
For an artist whose work had long centred on investigating the human body, the experience of creating life reshaped her relationship to form – moving her from a detached observer to a participant in its constant transformation. “I realised I spent my life painting flesh, and I could produce flesh in my body,” she said.
During this time, drawing – especially with charcoal – became a more immediate and flexible medium while raising children. No longer just a preparatory step, the drawn line took on its expressive weight in her finished compositions. Figures are layered, erased, and redrawn, and the isolated bodies of her earlier paintings gave way to intertwined intimate forms.
Motherhood also brought her into direct dialogue with Renaissance art. She drew on compositions by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, especially their depictions of the Virgin and Child, but reimagined them from the perspective of a woman who had actually experienced childbirth.
Mirror
Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) | Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1534) | Uffizi, Florence
Created between 2011 and 2012, Mirror is an exceptional example of Saville’s exquisite corpus of charcoal drawings. Measuring 152.4 × 215.5 cm, it offers a visual journey through Western art history, centred on the reclining nude.
Amid a tangle of entwined bodies, Saville layers visual references across centuries. On the left, the face, neck ribbon, and bracelet of Édouard Manet’s Olympia are superimposed with the profile, rounded belly, and clutched flowers of Titian’s Venus of Urbino.
The Arcadian landscape of Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus is set in tension with the fractured modernism of Picasso’s Nu couché à la couronne de fleurs, rendered as a canvas propped against the wall behind the right-hand figure.
Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus (1510) | Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
Pablo Picasso’s Nu couché à la couronne de fleurs (1970) | Private collection
The artist's self-portrait
At the far edge of the composition, Saville inserts herself – her face doubled, or mirrored, as the title suggests. Loose sketch lines – earlier poses left visible but not erased – suggest echoes of movement, offering a glimpse into the working process of one of the most celebrated portraitists of her generation.
Confronting a patriarchal lineage of the female body under the male gaze, Saville re-examines these canonical figures from a contemporary, embodied perspective. In doing so, she not only challenges what has come before, but also asserts her own creative legacy into the artistic canon.
Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting
Date: Now until 7 September 2025
Venue: National Portrait Gallery
Address: St Martin's Place, London, WC2H 0HE
Price: £21 / 23.50 with donation | Free for Members