Collection: Lucian Freud Archive

Lucian Michael Freud, OM (8 December 1922 – 20 July 2011) was a British painter and draftsman, specialising in figurative art, and is known as one of the foremost 20th-century portraitists. He was born in Berlin, the son of Jewish architect Ernst L. Freud and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. His family moved to Britain in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism. From 1942–43 he attended Goldsmiths College, London. He enlisted in the Merchant Navy during the Second World War.

His early career as a painter was influenced by surrealism, 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 impacted, often set in unsettling interiors and urban landscapes. The works are noted for their psychological penetration and often discomforting 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.