Lucian Michael Freud (; 8 December 1922 – 20 July 2011) was a British painter and draughtsman, specialising in figurative art, who is known as one of the foremost 20th-century English portraitists.
His early career as a painter was influenced by surrealism, and afterwards by expressionism, but by the early 1950s his often stark and alienated paintings tended towards realism. Freud was an intensely private and guarded man, and his paintings, completed over a 60-year career, are mostly of friends and family. They are generally sombre and thickly impastoed, often set in unsettling interiors and urban landscapes. The works are noted for their psychological penetration and often discomfiting examination of the relationship between artist and model. Freud worked from life studies and was known for asking for extended and punishing sittings from his models.
Born in Berlin (then part of the Weimar Republic) on 8 December 1922, Freud got the name "Lucian" from his mother in commemoration of the ancient writer Lucian of Samosata. Freud's parents were German-Jewish mother, Lucie (née Brasch), and Austrian-Jewish father, Ernst L. Freud, an architect who was the fourth child of Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Lucian, the second of their three boys, was the elder brother of the broadcaster, writer and politician Clement Freud (thus uncle of Emma and Matthew Freud) and the younger brother of Stephan Gabriel Freud.
The family emigrated to St John's Wood, London, in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism. Lucian attended Dartington Hall School in Totnes, Devon, and later Bryanston School for a year before being expelled for disruptive behaviour. He became a British subject in 1939.
Freud briefly studied at the Central School of Art in London, and from 1939 to 1942 with greater success at Cedric Morris' East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham, relocated in 1940 to Benton End, a house near Hadleigh, Suffolk. He also attended Goldsmiths' College, part of the University of London, in 1942–43. He served as a merchant seaman in an Atlantic convoy in 1941 before being invalided out of the service in 1942. Because of his poor physical condition, he avoided conscription, unlike his brothers.
In 1943, the poet and editor Meary James Thurairajah Tambimuttu commissioned Freud to illustrate Nicholas Moore's poetry collection The Glass Tower. It was published in 1944 by Editions Poetry London and comprised, among other drawings, a stuffed zebra and a palm tree. Both subjects reappeared in The Painter's Room on display at Freud's first solo exhibition in 1944 at the Lefevre Gallery. In the summer of 1946, he travelled to Paris before continuing to Greece for several months to visit John Craxton. In the early 1950s, he frequently visited Dublin, where he would share Patrick Swift's studio. He remained a Londoner for the rest of his life.
Freud was one of a number of figurative artists whom artist R. B. Kitaj later called the "School of London". This group was a loose collection of artists who knew each other, some intimately, and worked in London at the same time in the figurative style. The group was active contemporaneously with the boom years of abstract painting and in contrast to abstract expressionism. Major figures in the group included Freud, Kitaj, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, Leon Kossoff, Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde, and Reginald Gray. Freud was a visiting tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art of University College London from 1949 to 1954.
Freud's first exhibition outside of London took place in the Hartlepool Art Gallery in 1972, which was arranged by his friend the artist John Wilson McCracken, whom he had met in London.
Freud's early paintings, which are mostly very small, are often associated with German expressionism (an influence he tended to deny) and surrealism in depicting people, plants and animals in unusual juxtapositions. Some very early works anticipate the varied flesh tones of his mature style, for example Cedric Morris (1940, National Museum of Wales), but after the end of the war he developed a thinly painted very precise linear style with muted colours, best known in his self-portrait Man with a Thistle (1946, Tate) and a series of large-eyed portraits of his first wife, Kitty Garman, such as Girl with a Kitten (1947, Tate). These were painted with tiny sable brushes and evoke Early Netherlandish painting.
In the 1950s, Freud began to focus on portraiture, often nudes (though his first full-length nude was not painted until 1966), to the almost complete exclusion of everything else, and by the middle of the decade he developed a much freer style using large hog's-hair brushes, concentrating on the texture and colour of flesh, and much thicker paint, including impasto. Girl with a White Dog (1951–52, Tate) is an example of a transitional work in this process, sharing many characteristics with paintings before and after it, with relatively tight brushwork and a middling size and viewpoint. Freud often cleaned his brush after each stroke when painting flesh, so that the colour remained constantly variable. He also started to paint standing up, which continued until old age, when he switched to a high chair. The colours of non-flesh areas in these paintings are typically muted while the flesh becomes increasingly highly and variably coloured. By about 1960, Freud had established the style that he used, with some changes, for the rest of his career. The later portraits often use an over life-size scale but are of mostly relatively small heads or in half-lengths. Later portraits are often much larger. In his late career, he often followed a portrait with an etching of the subject in a different pose, drawing directly onto the plate, with the sitter in his view.
Freud's portraits often depict only the sitter, sometimes sprawled naked on the floor or on a bed or alternatively juxtaposed with something else, as in Girl With a White Dog and Naked Man With Rat (1977–78). According to Edward Chaney, "The distinctive, recumbent manner in which Freud poses so many of his sitters suggests the conscious or unconscious influence both of his grandfather's psychoanalytical couch and of the Egyptian mummy, his dreaming figures, clothed or nude, staring into space until (if ever) brought back to health and/or consciousness. The particular application of this supine pose to freaks, friends, wives, mistresses, dogs, daughters and mother alike (the last frequently depicted after her suicide attempt and, eventually, literally mummy-like in death), tends to support this hypothesis."
The use of animals in his compositions is widespread, and often he features a pet and its owner. Other examples of portraits with both animals and people in Freud's work include Guy and Speck (1980–81), Eli and David (2005–06) and Double Portrait (1985–86). He had a special passion for horses, having enjoyed riding at school in Dartington, where he sometimes slept in the stables. His portraits solely of horses include Grey Gelding (2003), Skewbald Mare (2004), and Mare Eating Hay (2006). Wilting houseplants feature prominently in some portraits, especially in the 1960s, and Freud also produced a number of paintings purely of plants. Other regular features included mattresses in earlier works, and huge piles of the linen rags he used to clean his brushes in later ones. Some portraits, especially in the 1980s, have very carefully painted views of London roofscapes seen through the studio windows.
Freud's subjects, who needed to make a very large and uncertain commitment of their time, were often the people in his life; friends, family, fellow painters, lovers, children. He said, "The subject matter is autobiographical. It's all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement, really." But the titles were mostly anonymous and the sitter's identity not always disclosed; the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire had a portrait of one of Freud's daughters as a baby for several years before he mentioned who the model was. In the 1970s, Freud spent 4,000 hours on a series of paintings of his mother, of which art historian Lawrence Gowing wrote, "it is more than 300 years since a painter showed as directly and as visually his relationship with his mother. And that was Rembrandt."