Lucian Freud valuation

The output is small in relation to demand because of how slowly he worked, and the paintings of the 1990s and 2000s lead. Etchings are the other significant body: Freud etched standing at the plate as he painted, in small editions typically of forty to fifty, and they are catalogued and well documented. Early works on paper from the 1940s are scarce and sought. Provenance and exhibition history do most of the work in a valuation, and the two-volume catalogue raisonne of paintings is the reference point.

Most of the etchings come from Freud's last three decades and were printed in London by Marc Balakjian of Studio Prints, who worked with him from 1985. The large heads and figures from those years are among the best-known British prints of the period. The catalogue raisonné of the prints by Toby Treves, published in 2022, records every image with its states and edition, and is the place to start with any sheet.

Alongside the numbered editions there are artist's proofs and printer's proofs, which are legitimate and recorded, and the difference between them usually matters less than condition. The sheets are large, so handling creases, staining from old mounts and fading at the margins are the faults to look for. Posters for his exhibitions are a separate category with a much smaller market, and are sometimes framed to look like prints.

Freud's mother named him after the ancient writer Lucian of Samosata. His father, Ernst, was an architect, and his younger brother was the broadcaster Clement Freud. In England he went to Dartington Hall and then Bryanston, which expelled him, and he became a British subject in 1939. He studied briefly at the Central School of Art, then from 1939 to 1942 with Cedric Morris at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham, and at Goldsmiths' College in 1942 and 1943. In 1941 he sailed as a merchant seaman in an Atlantic convoy before being invalided out.

In 1943 the editor Tambimuttu commissioned him to illustrate The Glass Tower, a collection of poems by Nicholas Moore, and its stuffed zebra and palm tree reappeared in The Painter's Room at his first solo exhibition in 1944. The postwar pictures are small and thinly painted with tiny sable brushes, as in Man with a Thistle of 1946 and the portraits of his first wife, Kitty Garman, among them Girl with a Kitten of 1947; both are at Tate. He married Lady Caroline Blackwood in Paris in 1953. His first full-length nude dates from 1966, and he was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1989, the year after his Hayward Gallery retrospective.