Lucian Freud
Painted flesh as a fact, over hundreds of sittings, for sixty years.
Lucian Freud was born in Berlin in 1922, grandson of Sigmund, and came to England in 1933. The early work is tight, linear and slightly airless; from the late 1950s, having switched to hog-hair brushes and Cremnitz white, he began painting standing up and produced the thick, unsparing figure paintings that define him. Sitters — family, friends, Leigh Bowery, Sue Tilley, the Queen — came for hundreds of sessions over months and years. He was one of the group Robert Hughes labelled the School of London, and he worked in Holland Park until his death in 2011.
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.
If you own a work by Lucian Freud
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.