Whether we know it or not ‘we crave the inexpressive in art’, Bernard Berenson wrote, as an antidote to the sensationalism of ‘the representational arts most alive, the cinema and the illustrated press’. He was writing about Euan Uglow’s great hero Piero della Francesca in an essay called The Ineloquent in Art, which came out in 1954, the year Uglow left the Slade, and made a deep impression on him: ‘There’s something about the title — the fact that there’s more force in controlled passion than in exuberant passion. That’s the idea I like. I like it slowly to creep out on you.’

Many people find it hard to connect Uglow’s painting with passion of any kind. He is famous for a particularly laborious method of painting which involved mathematical calculations, meticulous, even obsessive measuring, and complicated constructions of sighting wires and plumb-lines. The painting of a single figure could take up to seven years. The female nude was his great subject (together with portraits and still life), but the detached objectivity of his approach strikes some as being cold, unsensuous, even degrading.

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