“My work is purely autobiographical,…It is about myself and my surroundings. I work from people that interest me and that I care about, in rooms that I know… When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won’t. There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so.”
- Lucian Freud
Painting: IB and her husband
Painted in 1992 and sold for $11.4 million by Christie’s New York in November 2007, presents Freud’s daughter Isobel Boyt in her husband’s arms, sprawled on a grim bed, appearing to be asleep.
This is an interesting painting with a sense of emotional presence and intimacy.
‘Bruce Bernard’ is another painting sold by the Christie’s London in June 2007 for $15.5 million.
Bernard was the picture editor of the Sunday Times magazine from 1972 to 1980 and later became the visual arts editor of the Saturday Independent Magazine.
Friends with Freud since 1942 he declined to sit for his portrait for many years and only changed his mind upon hearing that Freud’s “working speed had appreciably increased.”
After Cézanne- Painted between 1999 and 2000 was sold for $7.4 million to the National Gallery of Australia.
After Cézanne is a variation on the theme of Paul Cézanne’s Afternoon in Naples.
Freud worked the painting on canvas first in charcoal, then in paint.
It looks like contemporary art may be pretty lucrative market after all.