Wien kunsthistorisches museum lucian freud biography

British painter and engraver (1922-2011)

Lucian Michael FreudOM CH^[1] (; 8 December 1922 – 20 July 2011) was a British painter and draughtsman, specialising in figurative art, and is known as one of the foremost 20th-century English portraitists.

He was born in Berlin, the son of Jewish architect Ernst L. Freud and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. Freud got his first name "Lucian" from his mother in memory of the ancient writer Lucian of Samosata.

Lucian freud paintings

His family moved to England in 1933, when he was 10 years old, to escape the rise of Nazism. He became a British naturalized citizen in 1939. From 1942 to 1943 he attended Goldsmiths' College, London. He served at sea with the British Merchant Navy during the Second World War.

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.^[2] Freud was an intensely private and g