Lucian Freud

Lucian Michael Freud, Born 8 December 1922 and died on the 20 July 2011. He was a German-born British painter. Known for his portrait and figure paintings, he was widely considered the pre-eminent British artist of his time. His works are noted for their psychological penetration, and for their often discomforting examination of the relationship between artist and model.

Born in Berlin, He was the son of a German Jewish mother, Lucie and an Austrian Jewish father, Ernst L. Freud an architect. He was a grandson of Sigmund Freud, and elder brother of the late broadcaster, writer and politician Clement Freud (uncle of Emma and Matthew Freud) and the younger brother of Stephan Gabriel Freud.

He moved with his family to St John's Wood, London, in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism. He became a British citizen in 1939,^[4] having attended Dartington Hall School in Totnes, Devon, and later Bryanston School, for a year before being expelled due to disruptive behaviour.

Freud's early paintings, which are mostly very small, are often associated with German Expressionism (an influence he tended to deny) and Surrealism 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, 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 Thistle and a series of large-eyed portraits of his first wife, Kitty Garman, such as Girl with a Kitten. These were painted with tiny sable brushes.

This picture shows the artist’s first wife when she was pregnant. The style of the painting has roots in the smooth and linear portraiture of the great nineteenth-century French neoclassical painter, Ingres. This, together with the particular psychological atmosphere of Freud’s early work, led the critic Herbert Read to make his celebrated remark that Freud was ‘the Ingres of Existentialism’.

The sense that Freud gives of human existence as essentially lonely, and spiritually if not physically painful, is something shared by his great contemporaries, Francis Bacon and the sculptor Alberto Giacometti.

This painting gives me the impression that she is depressed or lonely because of her facial expression, Or the fact she may be uncomfortable sitting there nude. The fact he has painted the dog in the painting gives me the impression that the dog is important in their lives. 

 "A young painter" was an oil on canvas painting by Freud in 1957-58. The painting of a young man stood out tome because of the way he was painted and the expression on his face. He is not looking directly at the painter and has an expression of sadness or depression.