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Joseph Clark Collection

Lucian Freud

1922–2011 · Painting, drawing and etching

Lucian Freud (1922–2011) was a Berlin-born British painter and draughtsman known for figurative portraits, mostly of friends and family, made from life over a sixty-year career. Tate holds works including Man with a Thistle (1946) and Girl with a White Dog (1951–52).

In the collection

About the artist

Lucian Freud was born in Berlin on 8 December 1922, a grandson of Sigmund Freud, and moved with his family to London in 1933; he became a British subject in 1939. He studied at Cedric Morris's East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing from 1939 to 1942 and at Goldsmiths' College in 1942–43, and had his first solo exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery in 1944 (Wikipedia).

His early paintings drew on surrealism, and after the war he worked in a thinly painted, precise linear style seen in Man with a Thistle (1946) and Girl with a Kitten (1947), both at Tate. From the 1950s he concentrated on portraiture, often nudes, and moved to thicker paint and larger brushes, working from life in long sittings, mostly with friends and family (Wikipedia).

Drawing ran through his method: he began a painting by drawing in charcoal, and in the last 25 years of his life he made etchings, often drawing directly onto the plate with the sitter in view (Wikipedia). He died in London on 20 July 2011. Tate's collection includes The Painter's Mother and Self-Portrait: Reflection (Tate).

Sources

  1. Wikipedia: Lucian Freud
  2. Tate: Lucian Freud

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