Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud 1922-, British painter, b. Berlin. A grandson of Sigmund Freud , he settled in England in 1933 and became a British subject in 1939. Freud is widely regarded as one of the world's finest figurative painters. Maintaining a restrained palette, he has moved from an emphasis on draftsmanship to a more tactile quality. He is especially known for highly expressive, heavily impastoed nudes and portraits painted with a disquieting realism that is at once brutally emphatic and richly detailed. Freud's intensely naked nudes, including Painter and Model (1986-87) and Naked Man, Back View (1992; Metropolitan Museum), have an almost meaty physicality. In portraiture, his best-known works include many self-portraits, for example Reflection with Children (1965) and Painter Working, Reflection (1993), and such works as Francis Bacon (1952; Tate Gallery), David Hockney (2002), and several portraits of his mother (1971-76).

Bibliography: See studies by L. Gowing (1982), B. Bruce and D. Birdsall, ed. (1996), R. Hughes (1993, rev. ed. 1997), and W. Feaver (2008).

Freud, Lucian (1922– ) British painter, b. Germany, grandson of Sigmund Freud. He is regarded as one of the strongest contemporary British figure painters. His most characteristic subjects are portraits, such as Francis Bacon (1952), and nudes, often painted in strikingly realistic close-up.