(b Berlin, 8 Dec 1922).
British painter and draughtsman. He was
the son of the architect Ernst Freud (1892–1970) and the grandson of SIGMUND
FREUD. His family moved to England
in 1932, and in 1939 he became a naturalized British subject and enrolled at
the East Anglian
School of Painting and Drawing, Dedham, run by Cedric
Morris. Apart from a year in Paris and Greece, Freud spent most of the rest of his
career in Paddington, London,
an inner-city area whose seediness is reflected in Freud’s often sombre and
moody interiors and cityscapes. In the 1940s he was principally interested in
drawing, especially the face, as in Naval Gunner (1941; priv.
col.), and occasionally using a distorted style reminiscent of George Grosz, as
in Page from a Sketchbook (1941; priv. col.). He began to turn his
attention to painting, however, and experimented with Surrealism, producing
such images as the Painter’s Room (1943; priv. col.), which features an
incongruous arrangement of objects, including a stuffed zebra’s head, a
battered chaise longue and a house plant, all of which survived his Surrealist
phase and appeared separately in later paintings. He was also loosely
associated with Neo-Romanticism, and the intense, bulbous eyes that
characterize his early portraits show affinities with the work of other artists
associated with the movement, such as John Minton, whose portrait he painted in
1952 (London, Royal Coll. A.). He established his own artistic identity,
however, in meticulously executed realist works, imbued with a pervasive mood
of alienation. He was dubbed by Herbert Read ‘the Ingres of existentialism’ (Contemporary
British Art, Harmondsworth, 1951, rev. 1964, p. 35) because of such
images as those of his first wife, Kitty (the daughter of Jacob Epstein),
nervously clutching a rose in Girl with Roses (1947–8; London, Brit. Council).
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