Painter and draughtsman Lucian Freud was born into a Jewish family in Berlin, Germany on 8 December 1922, the son of architect Ernst Freud and grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Following Hitler's accession to Chancellorship in 1933, the family moved to Britain and Freud was educated at Dartington Hall in Devon (1933–36) and Bryanston School. He was naturalised in 1939. He briefly attended the Central School of Arts and Crafts (1938–39), then the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing (1939–42), run by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines.
Freud’s first solo exhibition was held at Alex Reid and Lefevre Gallery in November 1944, followed by a joint exhibition with John Craxton at the London Gallery in 1947. Following a further solo exhibition at the Hanover Gallery in 1950, Freud won the Arts Council prize at the Festival of Britain for Interior at Paddington in 1951. In 1954 he shared the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale with fellow painters Francis Bacon and Ben Nicholson. As a visiting tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art Freud taught intermittently between 1948 and 1958 and held solo exhibitions at the Marlborough Gallery in 1958, 1963 and 1968. He worked slowly and almost always from life including numerous self-portraits, portraits of his lovers and a series of his mother, as well as the Duke of Devonshire and Jacob Rothschild, and many nudes.
In 1974, the Arts Council staged a retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, followed by an international retrospective, organised by the British Council at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC, touring to the Hayward Gallery, London, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (1987–8). A solo show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1993 was followed by a retrospective at Tate Britain in 2002 to mark his 80th birthday. Lucian Freud Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in 2012, planned for his 90th year, became his memorial exhibition. He was appointed Companion of Honour in 1983, and a member of the Order of Merit in 1993.
Lucian Freud died at his home in London, England on 20 July 2011 and is buried in Highgate Cemetery. One of the most celebrated British figurative painters of the twentieth century, his work is held in numerous public collections including the Arts Council Collection, the British Council Collection, the National Portrait Gallery, the Tate, and the V&A in the UK, and abroad.
