{"id":420856,"date":"2026-02-12T00:47:10","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T00:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/420856\/"},"modified":"2026-02-12T00:47:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-12T00:47:10","slug":"lucian-freuds-drawings-show-the-artist-at-his-most-spontaneous-and-personal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/420856\/","title":{"rendered":"Lucian Freud\u2019s drawings show the artist at his most spontaneous and personal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Drawing is much more to an artist than just another medium. For a painter particularly, it\u2019s the way they evolve ideas and find out who they are as an artist before brush even hits canvas. From Michelangelo to Picasso<\/a>, we\u2019ve come to think of drawing as the quickest way to access an artist\u2019s thought processes. Yet even by the standards of these great masters, Lucian Freud was almost pathologically preoccupied with the act of drawing. That\u2019s the principal revelation of the National Portrait Gallery<\/a>\u2019s new exhibition, the largest British survey to date of Freud\u2019s works on paper. From wax crayon sketches done at the age of six to highly personal late drawings, it provides a fascinating and essential trawl through little-regarded aspects of one of Britain\u2019s most treasured artists.<\/p>\n

Freud\u2019s early paintings are so preoccupied with sinuously suggestive lines and densely inscribed textures they often feel like drawings with paint added as an afterthought. Self-Portrait with Hyacinth in a Pot (1947), in which the 25-year-old peers back at us with an expression of self-regarding hyper-sensitivity against a yellow pastel background, all huge eyes and flaring nostrils, is precisely that. While Freud was only 11 when his family fled Berlin for Britain in 1933, the steely focus on material details \u2013 the tight waves of his hair, the flowers\u2019 curving petals \u2013 feels very Germanic, while edging into then fashionable Surrealism. In the quirky Quince on a Blue Table (1943), a zebra\u2019s head cranes into the canvas over a starkly painted still life. <\/p>\n

This show offers glimpses of a young experimental Freud that will be a revelation to most viewers: cack-handed sketches done on a Welsh cottage holiday with the poet Stephen Spender, aged 18, bring a hint of toilet wall graffiti; sleekly accomplished book illustrations could pass for frames from some modish graphic novel produced last week. <\/p>\n

Even well-known early paintings such as Girl with Roses (1947), showing his first wife Kitty Garman, retain a starkly outlined graphic quality, not least in the enormous, eerily staring eyes; hardly flattering, but at least you can\u2019t accuse him of wishy-washy prettiness. <\/p>\n

Drawings of Freud\u2019s male friends have a similarly seductive, stylised quality, including Portrait of a Young Man (1942), which is being used as one of the show\u2019s key promotional images. Far more powerful, however, is Christian Berard (1948), in which the French designer appears almost miraculously real and present. Yet the sense of disarming spontaneity is undercut in typical Freud fashion by the minutely detailed rendering of the beard and tufty textures of his dressing gown. Freud\u2019s great friend Francis Bacon, meanwhile, is captured, tellingly with his trousers unfastened, in just a few impulsive lines. <\/p>\n

Moving into the more familiar territory of Freud\u2019s mature work, many of the \u201cdrawings\u201d are in fact etchings, prints created by cutting into copper plates. While Freud drew directly into the plates in the presence of the sitter, these works have the carefully crafted quality of objects intended for public exhibition. They include some of his best-known works, including portraits of the shaven-headed performance artist Leigh Bowery and the majestically corpulent benefits officer Sue Tilley, shown alongside the related paintings. <\/p>\n

\"\u2018Portrait<\/p>\n

open image in gallery<\/p>\n

\u2018Portrait of a Young Man\u2019 (1942), Lucian Freud, Black crayon and chalk on paper (The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2025 \/ Bridgeman Images, Lent by a private collection)<\/p>\n

Much more revealing are rapidly executed preparatory drawings for paintings and etchings. These have the intimate, unguarded quality of images intended only for the artist\u2019s own eyes. Most moving are sketches in pencil and charcoal of the one subject Freud painted more frequently than himself: his mother. In an image such as the impulsively scrawled The Painter\u2019s Mother (1984), with the folds of the elderly woman\u2019s jowls and carelessly swept-back hair framing her still beady eyes, we feel we\u2019re present in the moment with Freud as he tries to seize an instant from eternity while there\u2019s still time. <\/p>\n

Many of the etchings are, of course, phenomenal works in their own right. In Bella (1983), the plate is so densely scraped and gouged that his fashion designer daughter\u2019s features look like they\u2019re forged from burnished iron. More personal, however, is a large sketch executed in brush-cleaning fluid, in which three attempts to capture Bella\u2019s likeness merge messily together, giving a rare sense of looking into aspects of the painting process Freud didn\u2019t intend us to see.<\/p>\n

This exhibition is full of great things, whether etchings, paintings or drawings, but it\u2019s in the latter that we\u2019re pulled deepest into the world of a man who gave the impression of living his life in the full glare of public attention, while remaining at his core absolutely private.<\/p>\n

\u2018Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting\u2019 is at the National Portrait Gallery from 12 February until 4 May <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Drawing is much more to an artist than just another medium. For a painter particularly, it\u2019s the way…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":420857,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-420856","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=420856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420856\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/420857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=420856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=420856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=420856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}