Blonde Girl on a Bed, c 1987
Lucian Freud was born in Berlin in 1922, the grandson of renowned psychologist Sigmund Freud. In 1933 Freud, along with his family, moved to London under the shadow of emerging Nazism. After initial schooling at Dartington Hall and Bryanston, Freud found himself at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. After a year, he moved to the less conventional East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing run by Cedric Morris.
Freud is one of the most celebrated figurative painters of the 20th century. He achieved huge critical and commercial success over a long career, notably painting a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II in 2000-01. He worked from life and is best known for his psychologically charged portraits and nudes.
Freud began producing etchings in 1946 during his first trip to Paris, using the wash basin in his hotel room as an acid bath. However, by 1954 he had moved away from printing to concentrate on painting and it was not until 1982 that he returned to graphic work. In the mid-1980s Freud began producing large scale nudes and portraits that often bore a relation to his contemporaneous paintings. Each work was an intensive observation of the human form.