Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud OM CH
Freud in 2005
Born	Lucian Michael Freud (1922-12-08)8 December 1922 Berlin, Brandenburg, Prussia, Germany
Died	20 July 2011(2011-07-20) (aged 88) London, England
Education	Central School of Art East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing Goldsmiths' College
Notable work	Cedric Morris (1940) Portrait of Kitty (1948–49) Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995)
Spouses	Kathleen Epstein ​ ​ (m. 1948; div. 1952)​ Lady Caroline Blackwood ​ ​ (m. 1952; div. 1959)​
Children	Various, including Annie, Esther, and Bella
Father	Ernst L. Freud
Relatives	Freud family

Lucian Michael Freud OM CH^[1] (/frɔɪd/; 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 English portraitists. He was born in Berlin, the son of Jewish architect Ernst L. Freud and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. Freud got his first name "Lucian" from his mother in memory of the ancient writer Lucian of Samosata. His family moved to England in 1933, when he was 10 years old, to escape the rise of Nazism. He became a British naturalized citizen in 1939. From 1942 to 1943 he attended Goldsmiths' College, London. He served at sea with the British 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.^[2] 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.^[3]