Lucien Freud: Drawing into Painting
- Madeleine Rick
- 11 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Lucien Freud is one of the most influential figurative artists of the twentieth century. With his intricate and inherently human eye for composition and structure, his work critiques the cyclical nature of the human experience and extends far beyond his own life. This year, the National Portrait Gallery has brought together an unprecedented number of Freud’s early sketches and paintings to create the most comprehensive museum exhibition of Freud’s work to be shown in the United Kingdom. Drawing into Painting is a tender reflection on Freud’s career as an artist, examining his own trajectory as a man and creator and exploring the nature of art as a mechanism for interpersonal and social understanding.
Building on an exhibition from 2012 which showcased Lucien Freud’s technical and emotional prowess as a painter, this new release by the National Portrait Galley hones in on Freud’s creative process. This exhibition follows the genealogy of his works from initial sketches to completed paintings and attempts to uncover the method behind his genius. Featuring over 170 artworks ranging from Freud’s childhood sketches, to paintings completed late in his life, this exhibition is centred on raw humanity and the complexity of the life cycle. Sarah Howgate, Senior Curator of Contemporary Collections at the National Portrait Gallery describes how ‘Lucien Freud was one of the greatest observers of the human condition in the twentieth-century. Widely known as a painter, this exhibition interrogates his lesser-known work as a draughtsman.’
What I find most fascinating about Freud’s work across this exhibit, and indeed across his life, is his mastery of the human eye. No matter what stage of his career, no matter how primitive the materials, no matter the form, Freud conjures a deep humanity and truth in his construction of his subjects' eyes. The formulation of their gaze and intricacies of colour and light construct portraits that feel human, like Freud has immortalised a moment in time and captured that individual’s entire life story in just their eyes. In this crayon and chalk Portrait of a Young Man from 1944, seen above, we can see the origins of Freud’s style as a sketcher and composer. While the sketch is foundational and two-dimensional, the eyes are beautifully realistic - the young man’s gaze looking through the viewer with their youthful and unsure demeanour.
Comparing this to his portrait of David Hockney from 2002, seen below, less than ten years before Freud’s death, we see the work of a measured, assured and cultivated artist at the end of his career. The texture and dimension of this piece illustrating a technical proficiency lacking in the Portrait of a Young Man, but still Freud’s depiction of the man’s eyes echo infallible humanity, the drooped gaze of a tempered, though perhaps worn, older man mirroring Freud’s development as an artist.
While the exhibition featured Freud’s most famous and artistically demanding works, the most poignant piece, in my opinion, was an unfinished and rather primitive oil self portrait from 1956, in which only the top half of the subject's face has been completed. With the painted portions completed in a similar style to the David Hockney portrait above, this piece is evocative of a still moment in time, a reprise and peek behind the curtain at the art of portrait. In an exhibition intending to trace Freud’s work from sketch to completion, this piece represents a microcosm of the creative process - evoking how Freud would delicately sketch his subject in sweeping lines of charcoal, before layering and texturing paint starting with the intricacies of the eyes, and spilling outwards from the centre. Though unfinished, Freud exhibited this work himself several times throughout his life, allowing for the inference that the artist believed this work to be complete in its incompleteness, perhaps not unfinished but purposefully tentative and melancholic in its reservations.
A tender snapshot behind the creative process of one of the greatest British portraitists of the twentieth century, the National Portrait Gallery weaves a narrative through the selection and placement of each piece. Including playful childhood sketches through to technically advanced paintings of a seasoned artist, rounded out with unfinished work from throughout his career. The exhibition breathes life into the work behind the canvas, examining the spontaneity of art as a discipline and the forever unfinished nature of and one's legacy.
The Lucien Freud: Drawing into Painting exhibition will be open to the public on the ground floor of the National Portrait Gallery in London from the 12th of February until the 3rd of May before touring the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek.
Photographs courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery
Featured Image: Girl in Bed (1952) by Lucien Freud, oil on canvas.
© The Lucien Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2025 / Bridgeman Images.
Photo © National Portrait Gallery, London. Lent by a private collection, courtesy of Ordovas, 2014.
Co-edited by Hania Ahmed, Creative Editor
