He is the son of Jewish parents Ernst Ludwig Freud, an architect, and Lucie née Brasch. He is the grandson of Sigmund Freud, brother of the late broadcaster, writer and politician Clement Freud (thus uncle of Emma and Matthew Freud) and of Stephan Gabriel Freud,
Freud and his family moved to England in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism, and became British citizens in 1939. During this period he attended Dartington Hall school in Totnes, Devon, and later Bryanston School.
Freud briefly studied at the Central School of Art in London then, with greater success, at Cedric Morris’ East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham, and also at Goldsmiths College – University of London from 1942-3. He served as a merchant seaman in an Atlantic convoy in 1941 before being invalided out of service in 1942. In 1943, Tambimuttu, the Ceylonese editor, commissioned the young artist to illustrate a book of poems by Nicholas Moore entitled “The Glass Tower”. It was published the following year by Editions Poetry London and comprised, among other drawings, a stuffed zebra (-cum-unicorn) and a palm tree. Both subjects reappeared in The Painter’s Room on display at Freud’s first solo exhibition in 1944 at the Alex Reid & Lefevre Gallery. In the summer of 1946, he travelled to Paris before continuing to Greece for several months. Since then he has lived and worked in London.
After Cezanne
His painting After Cézanne, which is notable because of its unusual shape, was bought by the National Gallery of Australia for $7.4 million. The top left section of this painting has been ‘grafted’ on to the main section below, and closer inspection reveals a horizontal line where these two sections were joined.
Freud’s early paintings are often associated with surrealism and depict people, plants and animals in unusual juxtapositions. These works are usually painted with relatively thin paint, but from the 1950s he began to paint portraits, often nudes, to the almost complete exclusion of everything else, employing a thicker impasto. With this technique he would often clean his brush after each stroke. The colors in these paintings are typically muted.
