Lucian Michael Freud, OM (; 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
portraitists. He was born in Berlin, the son of Jewish architect Ernst L. Freud
and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. His family moved to Britain in 1933 to
escape the rise of Nazism. From 1942-43 he attended Goldsmiths College, London.
He enlisted in the Merchant Navy during the Second World War.
His
early career as a painter was influenced by surrealism, but by the early 1950s
his often stark and alienated paintings tended towards realism. Freud was an
intensely private and guarded man, and his paintings, completed over a 60-year
career, are mostly of friends and family. They are generally sombre and thickly
impastoed, often set in unsettling interiors and urban landscapes. The works
are noted for their psychological penetration and often discomforting
examination of the relationship between artist and model. Freud worked from
life studies and was known for asking for extended and punishing sittings from
his models.