30 Facts About Lucian Freud

Lucian Michael Freud was a British painter and draughtsman, specialising in figurative art, and is known as one of the foremost 20th-century English portraitists.

Lucian Freud was born in Berlin, the son of Jewish architect Ernst L Freud and the grandson of Sigmund Freud.

Lucian Freud's family moved to England in 1933, when he was 10 years old, to escape the rise of Nazism.

Lucian Freud served at sea with the British Merchant Navy during the Second World War.

Lucian Freud worked from life studies, and was known for asking for extended and punishing sittings from his models.

Lucian Freud became a British subject in 1939, having attended Dartington Hall School in Totnes, Devon, and later Bryanston School, for a year before being expelled owing to disruptive behaviour.

Lucian 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.

Lucian Freud served as a merchant seaman in an Atlantic convoy in 1941 before being invalided out of service in 1942.

Lucian Freud remained a Londoner for the rest of his life.

Lucian Freud was a visiting tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art of University College London from 1949 to 1954.

Lucian Freud started to paint standing up, which continued until old age, when he switched to a high chair.

Lucian Freud had a special passion for horses, having enjoyed riding at school in Dartington, where he sometimes slept in the stables.

Wilting houseplants feature prominently in some portraits, especially in the 1960s, and Lucian Freud produced a number of paintings purely of plants.

Lucian Freud painted from life, and usually spent a great deal of time with each subject, demanding the model's presence even while working on the background of the portrait.

Lucian Freud then applied paint to a small area of the canvas, and gradually worked outward from that point.

Lucian Freud painted fellow artists, including Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon and produced a large number of portraits of the performance artist Leigh Bowery.

Lucian Freud painted Henrietta Moraes, a muse to many Soho artists.

Lucian Freud was one of the best known British artists working in a representational style, and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1989.

Lucian Freud's painting After Cezanne, noteworthy because of its unusual shape, was purchased by the National Gallery of Australia for $7.4 million.

In 1997 Lucian Freud received the Rubens Prize of the city of Siegen.

All print media bore the motif of Lucian Freud's outstanding painting Sleeping by the Lion Carpet depicting the nude Sue Tilley.

The Frankfurt exhibition was realised in a personal dialogue between curator Rolf Lauter and Lucian Freud and is thus the only project Freud authorised in direct cooperation with a German museum.

The major retrospective at London's Hayward Gallery in 1988 was the focal point for the BBC Omnibus programme which saw one of the very few conversations with Lucian Freud ever recorded, in this case with Omnibus director Jake Auerbach.

In 2001, Lucian Freud completed a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II.

In 2005, a retrospective of Lucian Freud's work was held at the Museo Correr in Venice scheduled to coincide with the Biennale.

Lucian Freud died in London on 20 July 2011 and is buried in Highgate Cemetery.

On 10 November 2015 Lucian Freud's 2004 painting The Brigadier, a portrait of Andrew Parker Bowles in his British Royal Army uniform, sold for $34.89 million US at Christie's in New York City, beating the $30 million US presale estimate for the work.

Kitty Lucian Freud, later known as Kitty Godley, died in 2011.

In late 1952, Lucian Freud eloped with Guinness heiress and writer Lady Caroline Blackwood to Paris, where they married in 1953; they divorced in 1959.

Lucian Freud is rumoured to have fathered as many as forty children although this number is generally accepted as an exaggeration.