Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud (1922–2011) was a British painter best known for his precise portraits. His name itself gives something away: he was the grandson of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. He was born in Berlin into a Jewish family and in 1933, the family had to flee Nazi Germany for England. London became his home for the rest of his life.

Freud painted almost exclusively people he knew: family, friends, lovers and fellow painters. He never worked from photographs, always painting people sitting in front of him so that a single portrait could take dozens of sittings over several months. The tight, linear style of his early work gave way in the late 1950s to thick paint that seemed alive to the very surface. It was the naked portraits that made him the most talked-about painter of his day, showing the body honestly and without flattery. Freud’s work is held in many of the world’s most significant collections, and he was appointed to the Order of Merit.