Lucian Freud Biography Quotes 25 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Lucian Michael Freud was born in Berlin in 1922 and became one of the most consequential figurative painters of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He was the grandson of Sigmund Freud, and his father, Ernst L. Freud, was an architect; his mother, Lucie, encouraged his early artistic inclinations. In 1933 the family left Germany for Britain in response to the rise of Nazism, a move that would shape his identity as a German-born British artist. He became a British citizen before reaching adulthood and made London the anchor of his life and work.

Education and Formation
Freud studied at progressive schools in Britain before pursuing art training in London. A crucial formative period came at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, where the painter Cedric Morris provided a mix of rigorous attention to looking and permissive individualism that suited Freud. Early on he was close to the painter John Craxton, and the two moved in circles that bridged neo-romantic sensibilities and a renewed engagement with direct observation. Freud absorbed lessons from Old Masters he studied in London museums, especially a linear precision evoking Holbein and Ingres, and he brought that clarity to early portraits and interiors.

Early Career
By the 1940s Freud was exhibiting and gaining attention for small, exacting paintings whose cool light and incisive drawing distinguished them from the broader modern currents around him. During the Second World War he briefly served in the British merchant navy before returning to London to paint. His early portrait Girl with a White Dog, which depicts his first wife, Kitty Garman, condensed his methods at the time: tight surfaces, lucid contours, and psychological intensity. Even then, the primacy of extended sittings and direct engagement with the sitter was becoming his defining practice.

London, Friendship, and the School of London
From the late 1940s onward Freud was part of a loose cohort later referred to as the School of London, a term popularized by R. B. Kitaj to describe painters who persisted with demanding figurative work when abstraction and conceptual art dominated. Among them were Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, and Michael Andrews. Freud and Bacon formed a famously intense friendship in the 1950s, often seen in Soho haunts such as the Colony Room. The relationship, by turns admiring and competitive, pressed Freud toward bolder scale and a riskier engagement with flesh and presence. Their conversations and mutual portraiture seeded some of the era's most probing images of human likeness. Although their bond cooled in later years, its imprint on Freud's work remained.

Technique and Evolution
Freud's development from the 1950s to the 1960s saw a shift from the linear, enamel-like smoothness of his earlier work to a progressively thicker, tactile use of paint. He adopted more robust hog-bristle brushes and a scraped, built-up facture that left evidence of time and touch on the surface. He painted from life, rarely from photographs, and insisted on long, recurrent sittings that could stretch over months. The studio, often in London's Paddington, was a stage of uncompromising observation: neutral light, battered furniture, bare floorboards, and the unvarnished presence of the sitter.

His nudes and portraits from the 1970s onward occupy a singular place in modern art. Flesh becomes landscape; paint stands for skin without evasion or idealization. He returned obsessively to subjects close to him: family, friends, lovers, and pets. The artist's gaze is unsparing but empathetic, and his surfaces record the persistence and mutual trust required for likeness at that depth.

Sitters and Circles
Freud's subjects chart his intimate world. He painted Kitty Garman, daughter of sculptor Jacob Epstein and Kathleen Garman, capturing an early domestic phase. His marriage to the writer Caroline Blackwood in the 1950s drew him into literary circles and produced portraits charged with complicated feeling. Over time, his sitters included the artist Frank Auerbach; the performance artist and fashion figure Leigh Bowery, whose monumental presence catalyzed some of Freud's grandest nudes; and Sue Tilley, the civil servant immortalized in Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, a painting that set an auction record for a living artist in 2008. He portrayed cultural figures such as Kate Moss and made a compact, scrutinizing portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, which sparked vigorous public debate about candor and likeness. In the studio, his assistant and later executor David Dawson sat for major works and documented the painter at work, preserving a rare view of Freud's relentless routine.

Working Life and Habits
Freud's days were disciplined and nocturnal; he painted for long stretches, building sessions around the stamina of sitter and painter alike. He disdained embellishment, preferring daylight or simple artificial light that kept color values sober. He often worked on multiple canvases of the same sitter, allowing months of observation to network across related images. The cumulative effect is one of time compressed into paint, an accrual of decisions and revisions that grants his figures a palpable, lived density. He approached animals with the same commitment, painting dogs and horses with the exacting attention he gave to people.

Personal Life
Freud led a complicated personal life that intersected continually with his art. He married Kitty Garman and later Caroline Blackwood; relationships beyond those marriages also shaped his circle of sitters. He had a large family, and many children became subjects, including the designer Bella Freud and the novelist Esther Freud. The writer Susie Boyt and others from his extended family and friendships also sat. In later decades he was known to frequent bookmakers and racing stables, interests that introduced new acquaintances into his studio. His privacy was fiercely guarded, yet the paintings disclose an ongoing autobiography through portraiture.

Recognition and Major Exhibitions
By the 1980s Freud had become a central figure in British art. He was appointed a Companion of Honour and later to the Order of Merit, acknowledgments of both national standing and sustained excellence. Major retrospectives consolidated his reputation, and museums in Britain, Europe, and the United States devoted large exhibitions to his portraits and nudes. The Tate organized a comprehensive show in the early 2000s that clarified his evolution from precise early portraits to the grand, tactile canvases of later years. The market also reflected his prominence. Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, painted from Sue Tilley's prolonged sittings, sold for a record price for a living artist in 2008, underscoring the cultural appetite for the unflinching human presence that his work offered.

Legacy and Influence
Freud's legacy rests on his fidelity to looking and his refusal to sentimentalize. Against a backdrop of rapidly shifting art movements, he upheld painting as a direct confrontation between artist and subject. His impact is evident in subsequent generations who engage figuration with renewed seriousness, and in the persistence of the School of London's ethos: attention to the human figure as a moral as well as aesthetic pursuit. Artists such as Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff worked in parallel commitments, and their mutual regard fortified the viability of paint at a time when its relevance was questioned.

Freud's portraits of friends and family have become part of Britain's visual memory, reshaping how public figures and private individuals might be seen. He left an archive of drawings and etchings alongside paintings, each reflecting the same insistence on time and presence.

Later Years and Death
Freud painted well into old age, often with David Dawson organizing the logistics of his exacting schedule. Even as public honors accumulated, he preserved a studio-centered life that placed the act of painting above all else. He died in London in 2011, leaving behind an oeuvre that maps nearly seven decades of sustained looking. Posthumous exhibitions, including a landmark survey of his portraits, consolidated the view that his relentless inquiry into the specificity of bodies and faces gave late twentieth-century painting one of its most articulate voices.

Our collection contains 25 quotes who is written by Lucian, under the main topics: Truth - Art - Letting Go.