Lucian Freud

Lucian Michael Freud (8 December 1922 – 20 July 2011) was a British painter and draughtsman, specialising in figurative art, who is known as one of the foremost 20th-century English portraitists.

His early career as a painter was influenced by surrealism, and afterwards by expressionism, 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 discomfiting 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.