.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘Whether it’s the particularity of an object or an individual, you can follow that thread from his very early drawings all the way through’ (David Dawson)
Offered in tandem with the landmark exhibition Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting (February – May 2026) at the National Portrait Gallery in London, this remarkable collection traces Lucian Freud’s graphic and painterly evolution from the 1920s to the early 2000s. All gifted from Freud to the present owner, the group starts at the very inception of his creative life, with drawings made while he was a young child still living in Germany. The journey continues through his earliest surviving oil painting to his first forays into human observation, culminating in a powerful portrait of Susanna Chancellor, an important figure in Freud’s later practice.
‘The story begins’, writes Jacob Simon, ‘with Old Man Running, dating from 1937 or 1938, which Freud painted on canvas board while he was a pupil at Bryanston School in Dorset’ (J. Simon, ‘Lucian Freud’s Painting Materials and Practice’, in C. Lampert and T. Treves, Lucian Freud: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, London 2025, vol. 1, p. 81). This lively, enigmatic work is the first oil painting recorded in Freud’s catalogue raisonné. Depicting a bearded figure that has been compared to the artist’s grandfather, Sigmund Freud, it was likely among three pictures that his mother, Lucie Freud, submitted to Peggy Guggenheim’s exhibition of children’s art at her Cork Street gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, in 1938.
Lucie Freud was ambitious for her son, and it is thanks to her that many of his earliest drawings, made before the family left Germany for England in 1933, were preserved for posterity. Raised in a cultured Berlin household, Freud was exposed to art from an early age. The subjects of his first pictures are not unusual, notes Toby Treves: ‘he drew houses and animals and people. There were plants and trees, too, and as many colours as in a box of crayons’ (T. Treves, ‘An Introduction’, in ibid., p. 11). The close attention to botanical and animal life, however, would endure throughout his later work. The drawing of a hyacinth seen here, made when Freud was around seven years old, foreshadows his striking self-portrait with the same flower made in 1947-1948 (Pallant House Gallery, Chichester). It was among several of the collection’s childhood drawings to feature in Lucian Freud: Plant Portraits at the Garden Museum, London, in 2022-2023
At school in Dartington Freud also developed a close affinity with horses, one of whom grins from the colourful, dreamlike watercolour of 1941 presented here. Another equine motif emerged in the form of a prized stuffed zebra head, which decorated the flat in Delamere Terrace, Paddington, where he began living with his friend John Craxton in 1942. This striped specimen became an iconic, somewhat surreal presence in Freud’s pictures of the time. It is admired here in the drawing Zebra Head on a Chair (1944), echoing its appearance in the contemporaneous painting The Painter’s Room—shown in Freud’s breakthrough exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery that year—and in Quince on a Blue Table (1943-1944), presently on view at the National Portrait Gallery.
It was during these years that Freud’s observational gaze began to sharpen. ‘Freud is a mimic’, said Craxton. ‘He has to see continually what he has to paint’ (J. Craxton quoted in W. Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth 1922 - 1968, London 2019, p. 170). The present group includes sketches from a trip to Scotland in the summer of 1943, with sleeping passengers on the night train to Inverness and an attendant ghillie at Loch Ness. Studies of nudes, faces, feet and hands see the emergence of Freud’s forensic focus on what he sees.
Human sitters would become ever more central to Freud’s work, seized in the sharply detailed paintings of the 1950s and later bodied forth in a distinctive, richly worked impasto. Susanna (Fragment) (circa 1978), an example of the fragmentary pictures that Freud allowed to be kept if he felt they had attained an independent sense of life, exemplifies the vital presence he was able to achieve. This is the first painting Freud made of Susanna Chancellor, one of his closest confidantes, with whom he remained involved until his death in 2011. ‘The paintings of her were to be the most intimate he would do’, writes William Feaver. ‘She had become, and was to remain, a lasting presence’ (W. Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame 1968 - 2011, London 2019, p. 169).
It was Chancellor who introduced Freud to whippets, the elegant dogs that would enliven his drawings, paintings and etchings across the final two decades of his life. After depicting her with her hounds in works such as the celebrated Double Portrait (1985-1986), Freud acquired his own, Pluto. A delicate pen and ink drawing of one of the dogs appears in a copy of the 1996 Freud monograph by Bruce Bernard and Derek Birdsall offered from the present collection. It is inscribed ‘ILYWAMH’: ‘I love you with all my heart.’ No less poignant is a pencil drawing of the grave of Pluto, who was laid to rest in Freud’s Kensington Church Street garden in April 2003. Chancellor was by his side at the time. A painting Freud made of the same subject is offered in Christie’s 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 5 March.
Offered in tandem with the landmark exhibition Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting (February – May 2026) at the National Portrait Gallery in London, this remarkable collection traces Lucian Freud’s graphic and painterly evolution from the 1920s to the early 2000s. All gifted from Freud to the present owner, the group starts at the very inception of his creative life, with drawings made while he was a young child still living in Germany. The journey continues through his earliest surviving oil painting to his first forays into human observation, culminating in a powerful portrait of Susanna Chancellor, an important figure in Freud’s later practice.
‘The story begins’, writes Jacob Simon, ‘with Old Man Running, dating from 1937 or 1938, which Freud painted on canvas board while he was a pupil at Bryanston School in Dorset’ (J. Simon, ‘Lucian Freud’s Painting Materials and Practice’, in C. Lampert and T. Treves, Lucian Freud: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, London 2025, vol. 1, p. 81). This lively, enigmatic work is the first oil painting recorded in Freud’s catalogue raisonné. Depicting a bearded figure that has been compared to the artist’s grandfather, Sigmund Freud, it was likely among three pictures that his mother, Lucie Freud, submitted to Peggy Guggenheim’s exhibition of children’s art at her Cork Street gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, in 1938.
Lucie Freud was ambitious for her son, and it is thanks to her that many of his earliest drawings, made before the family left Germany for England in 1933, were preserved for posterity. Raised in a cultured Berlin household, Freud was exposed to art from an early age. The subjects of his first pictures are not unusual, notes Toby Treves: ‘he drew houses and animals and people. There were plants and trees, too, and as many colours as in a box of crayons’ (T. Treves, ‘An Introduction’, in ibid., p. 11). The close attention to botanical and animal life, however, would endure throughout his later work. The drawing of a hyacinth seen here, made when Freud was around seven years old, foreshadows his striking self-portrait with the same flower made in 1947-1948 (Pallant House Gallery, Chichester). It was among several of the collection’s childhood drawings to feature in Lucian Freud: Plant Portraits at the Garden Museum, London, in 2022-2023
At school in Dartington Freud also developed a close affinity with horses, one of whom grins from the colourful, dreamlike watercolour of 1941 presented here. Another equine motif emerged in the form of a prized stuffed zebra head, which decorated the flat in Delamere Terrace, Paddington, where he began living with his friend John Craxton in 1942. This striped specimen became an iconic, somewhat surreal presence in Freud’s pictures of the time. It is admired here in the drawing Zebra Head on a Chair (1944), echoing its appearance in the contemporaneous painting The Painter’s Room—shown in Freud’s breakthrough exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery that year—and in Quince on a Blue Table (1943-1944), presently on view at the National Portrait Gallery.
It was during these years that Freud’s observational gaze began to sharpen. ‘Freud is a mimic’, said Craxton. ‘He has to see continually what he has to paint’ (J. Craxton quoted in W. Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth 1922 - 1968, London 2019, p. 170). The present group includes sketches from a trip to Scotland in the summer of 1943, with sleeping passengers on the night train to Inverness and an attendant ghillie at Loch Ness. Studies of nudes, faces, feet and hands see the emergence of Freud’s forensic focus on what he sees.
Human sitters would become ever more central to Freud’s work, seized in the sharply detailed paintings of the 1950s and later bodied forth in a distinctive, richly worked impasto. Susanna (Fragment) (circa 1978), an example of the fragmentary pictures that Freud allowed to be kept if he felt they had attained an independent sense of life, exemplifies the vital presence he was able to achieve. This is the first painting Freud made of Susanna Chancellor, one of his closest confidantes, with whom he remained involved until his death in 2011. ‘The paintings of her were to be the most intimate he would do’, writes William Feaver. ‘She had become, and was to remain, a lasting presence’ (W. Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame 1968 - 2011, London 2019, p. 169).
It was Chancellor who introduced Freud to whippets, the elegant dogs that would enliven his drawings, paintings and etchings across the final two decades of his life. After depicting her with her hounds in works such as the celebrated Double Portrait (1985-1986), Freud acquired his own, Pluto. A delicate pen and ink drawing of one of the dogs appears in a copy of the 1996 Freud monograph by Bruce Bernard and Derek Birdsall offered from the present collection. It is inscribed ‘ILYWAMH’: ‘I love you with all my heart.’ No less poignant is a pencil drawing of the grave of Pluto, who was laid to rest in Freud’s Kensington Church Street garden in April 2003. Chancellor was by his side at the time. A painting Freud made of the same subject is offered in Christie’s 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 5 March.