Lucian Freud

Painter, born in Berlin, Germany, the grandson of Sigmund Freud. He moved to Britain in 1933, and studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London (1938–9) and the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, Dedham. In his early years he was one of the neo-Romantic group of English painters along with Minton, Craxton, Sutherland, and Piper, but since the 1950s he has developed a realistic style.

Lucien Freud
Lucien Freud. Composite image by procsilas
Born	8 December 1922 Berlin, Germany
Nationality	British
Field	Portrait painting, Nudes
Training	Central School of Art, London, East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, Dedham, Essex, Goldsmiths College, London
Movement	Surrealism

Lucian Freud, OM, CH (born 8 December 1922) is a British painter and printmaker.

Freud was born in Berlin, Germany in 1922, son of Jewish parents Ernst Ludwig Freud, an architect, and Lucie née Brasch. He is the grandson of Sigmund Freud and brother of Clement Freud, Freud and his family moved to the UK in 1933 due to the rise of Nazism, gaining British citizenship in 1939.

Freud studied briefly at the Central School of Art in London then, with greater success, at Cedric Morris's East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham, and also at Goldsmiths College - University of London from 1942-3.

Freud's early paintings are often associated with surrealism and depict people and plants in unusual juxtapositions.

Often Freud's portraits just depict the sitter, sometimes sprawled naked on the floor or on a bed, but sometimes the sitter is juxtaposed with something else, as in Girl With a White Dog and Naked Man With Rat.

"I paint people," Freud has said, "not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be."

Freud has painted a number of fellow artists, including Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon.

Freud is one of the best known British artists working in a traditional representational style. He has children by Jacquetta Lampson, daughter of the first Baron Killearn, and by Bernardine Coverley (Bella Freud and writer Esther Freud), Suzy Boyt (5 children: Ali, Rose Boyt, Isobel, and Susie Boyt), and Margaret McAdam (2 children).

Lucian Freud served as a visiting tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art (1949-54), University College, London.

Although internationally acknowledged as one of the most important artists working today, there have been few opportunities to see Lucian Freud's paintings and etchings in Britain.

During a period from May 2000 to December 2001, Freud painted Queen Elizabeth II.