Drawings 1940

by Lucian Freud, Sebastian Smee

Essay by Sebastian Smee. 238 pages. 168 plates. Hardcover with dustjacket.

8 7/8 x 5 7/8 inches; 22.5 x 15 cm.

This book reproduces 168 drawings made by the painter Lucian Freud when he was seventeen years old. Freud passed the first winter of World War II in a cottage in Capel Curig, Wales, with a school friend, David Kentish, and the poet Stephen Spender. It was during this stay that the majority of the drawings assembled here were realized, with the remainder executed in London later that year. The drawings are reproduced actual size and most are seen here for the first time.

238 pages, Hardcover

First published February 10, 2003

About the author

Lucian Michael Freud was a British painter and draughtsman, specialising in figurative art, and is known as one of the foremost 20th-century English portraitists. He was born in Berlin, the son of Jewish architect Ernst L. Freud and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. Freud got his first name "Lucian" from his mother in memory of the ancient writer Lucian of Samosata. His family moved to England in 1933, when he was 10 years old, to escape the rise of Nazism. He became a British naturalized citizen in 1939. From 1942 to 1943 he attended Goldsmiths College, London. He served at sea with the British Merchant Navy during the Second World War.

His early career as a painter was influenced by surrealism, but by the early 1950s his often stark and alienated paintings tended towards realism. Freud was an intensely private and guarded man, and his paintings, completed over a 60-year career, are mostly of friends and family. They are generally sombre and thickly impastoed, often set in unsettling interiors and urban landscapes. The works are noted for their psychological penetration and often discomforting examination of the relationship between artist and model. Freud worked from life studies, and was known for asking for extended and punishing sittings from his models.