If saturation point is looming, it is not here yet. \u201cFor anyone who thinks they know Freud\u2019s work, this exhibition is an opportunity to discover a less familiar, more intimate view,\u201d says Sarah Howgate, who has co-curated the NPG\u2019s new show with David Dawson, Freud\u2019s studio assistant from 1991 to 2011 and now the director of the Lucian Freud Archive.<\/p>\n
Acquired by the NPG after Freud\u2019s death in 2011, the archive presents a rich and plentiful supply of new material, augmented by the acquisition in 2024 of 12 works from the artist\u2019s estate, among them eight etchings, which are the first by Freud to enter the gallery\u2019s collection.<\/p>\n
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Freud’s 1995 etching Bella in her Pluto T-Shirt \u00a9 The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved [2025] \/ Bridgeman Images. Collection: National Portrait Gallery<\/p>\n
Comprising 48 sketchbooks, unfinished paintings, childhood drawings and letters, the archive materials \u201creveal the artist\u2019s thought processes in a way finished paintings cannot\u201d, Howgate says.<\/p>\n
The evidence of his sketchbooks dispels the myth that Freud gave up drawing in the 1950s as his focus shifted to painting. Instead, Howgate writes in the catalogue, \u201cfor the following 20 years or so, drawing became a backdrop to his painting, a more private activity in sketchbooks, which recorded the ebb and flow of his life behind studio doors and his daily thinking as an artist.\u201d<\/p>\n
Annotated with phone numbers, betting tips, drafted love letters and appointments, Freud\u2019s sketchbooks emphasise not only the biographical nature of his practice but the importance he attached to drawing as a fundamental means of communication. From youthful sketches in crayon, to the tattoos he administered during his time in the merchant navy, to the etchings of his later years, Freud\u2019s drawings were a constant, if shifting, activity that captured aspects of his relationships with wives and girlfriends, children, pets, friends and fellow artists.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe exhibition is an exploration of how drawing remained central to Freud\u2019s practice throughout his working life and how some of the most significant changes in his art can be traced through his work on paper\u201d, Howgate says. The drawings parallel the development of his painting style, with the austere linearity of his early work giving way to a more painterly approach, echoed in the pencil and charcoal drawings of the 1970s, and his etchings, which, he said, he wanted \u201cto work like paintings\u201d.<\/p>\n
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Lucian Freud\u2019s oil painting Girl in Bed (1952) \u00a9 The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2025 \/ Bridgeman Images. Photo: \u00a9 National Portrait Gallery, London. Lent by a private collection, courtesy of Ordovas<\/p>\n
At points in the exhibition, drawings will be shown alongside paintings, highlighting their function not just as a preparatory stage but as a means for discovering and developing ideas. Such juxtapositions \u201cdemonstrate how Freud used drawing as a way of forensically observing his subjects\u201d, Howgate says. The traces of charcoal underdrawing in his unfinished painting, Last Portrait (1974\u200a-77), show the merging of these two aspects of his practice.<\/p>\n
Elsewhere, the drawings he made following his Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau) (1981-83) reverse the process and instead show him honouring, and subverting, the influence of Jean-Antoine Watteau, one of several artistic antecedents.<\/p>\n