A sumptuous single-volume edition of Phaidon's acclaimed overview of one of the greatest painters of our time. Provoking, vital, engrossing, gorgeously produced, revelatory even to Freud fans, and a joyous contribution to scholarship, this extravagant two-volume retrospective includes little-seen, privately owned work spanning seven decades, early illustrated letters, the first publication of Freud's rarest etchings, stories of sitters from loves to bookmaker and bank robber. My art book of the year.' - Financial Times Feaver’s vastly detailed biography is the ideal companion to Freud’s work. It resembles nothing so much as a large Freud canvas: hypnotic, occasionally reiterative, quirkily dark in places, proceeding by a process of obsessive accretion. Lucian Freud, not a real painter? On this evidence he was real enough. The tension ratchets as Gayford yearns for the sittings to come to an end and Freud grows jumpier at the prospect. Few artists have anything very interesting to say on the subject of ending, but Freud does: "The painting's done when I have the sensation I am painting someone else's picture."

Lampert, Catherine; Lauter, Rolf; (2001). Lucian Freud: After Cézanne, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2001. Australia: National Gallery of Australia. p. 24. ISBN 0642541477.

Notes to editors

Smith, Roberta (14 December 2007). "Lucian Freud Stripped Bare". The New York Times . Retrieved 22 July 2011. In the 1940s Freud and fellow artists Adrian Ryan and John Minton were in a homosexual love triangle. [49] After an affair with Lorna Garman, he went on to marry, in 1948, her niece Kitty Garman, the illegitimate daughter of sculptor Jacob Epstein and socialite Kathleen Garman. [50] [51] They had two daughters, Annabel Freud and the poet Annie Freud, before their marriage ended in 1952. [52] Kitty Freud, later known as Kitty Godley (after her marriage in 1955 to economist Wynne Godley), died in 2011. [53] Your final selection among the best Lucian Freud books, Nollekens and his Times, was not easy to come by. At Five Books we are always keen on prompting our readers to seek out interesting and authoritative texts whether in print or out of print. You’ve described this book as the rumbustious memoirs of a portrait bust maker. How does this book illuminate Freud?

It was Freud's practice to begin a painting by first drawing in charcoal on the canvas. He then applied paint to a small area of the canvas, and gradually worked outward from that point. For a new sitter, he often started with the head as a means of "getting to know" the person, then painted the rest of the figure, eventually returning to the head as his comprehension of the model deepened. [26] A section of canvas was intentionally left bare until the painting was finished. [26] The finished painting is an accumulation of richly worked layers of pigment, as well as months of intense observation. [26] Later career [ edit ] Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, 1995, a very large portrait of "Big Sue" Tilley, showing his handling of flesh tones, and a typical high viewpoint Perhaps the coarseness came to equate with candour. That seems the case with the final self-portraits in this show. Almost the smallest of these is nonetheless the most monumental. Painter Working, Reflection, made when Freud was 71, casts a cold eye upon his own body, reflected in the studio mirror, naked except for the famous laceless boots flapping like devil’s hooves. The artist brandishes the palette knife with which he has worked up the pelleted surface of this very picture; a conductor with a baton, or perhaps a late Prospero with his wand. This time the portrait meets the man head on: unique and full force.

Freud briefly studied at the Central School of Art in London, and from 1939 to 1942 with greater success at Cedric Morris' East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham, relocated in 1940 to Benton End, a house near Hadleigh, Suffolk. He also attended Goldsmiths' College, part of the University of London, in 1942–43. He served as a merchant seaman in an Atlantic convoy in 1941 before being invalided out of service in 1942. Ayers, Robert (18 December 2007). "Curator's Voice: Starr Figura on Lucian Freud's Etchings". BLOUINARTINFO . Retrieved 23 April 2008. Michael Kimmelman’s 'Portraits: Talking with Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre and Elsewhere' (Random House, 1998) The picture seethes with suppressed feeling: jealousy, resignation, feigned nonchalance. The whole thing shows that even Freud’s large interiors are still portraits, the human body firmly central – in the case of this painting, quite literally so. Watteau may be the official inspiration, but the real secret to its arrangement is Titian’s Diana and Callisto, which Freud – Feaver tells us – considered the most beautiful picture in the world. He was obsessed with the “amazing deep navel” of the reclining Diana in Titian’s composition and when he restaged the Watteau he did it on Titian’s giant scale, putting that navel in the middle. It becomes the hole in the body of the mandolin that Bella clutches against her stomach. This detail anchors the entire picture: a virtuoso display of contrasting states of mind that nevertheless have an emphatic physical axis.