Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud was born in 1922 in Berlin and came to England with his family in 1933. He studied, for a short time, at the Central School of Art in London. He also studied at Cedric Morris’s East Anglican School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham. In 1941 he served as a merchant seaman in an Atlantic convoy. Freud’s first solo exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery in 1944 featured “The Painter’s Room”. He went to Paris in the summer of 1946 and afterwards traveled to Greece. He now lives and works in London.

During the 1940s, Freud began a short career as a skillful and talented etcher, but he turned away from the medium for more than 30 years to pursue a career as a realist painter. He returned to printmaking in 1982, creating portraits and studies of the naked figure that achieved a power and intensity comparable to that of his paintings. Freud often uses people in his life as subjects, for example: friends, family, fellow painters, lovers and children.