Fern

'Freud found even greater scope for his imagination in the illustrations and decorations which he was commissioned to make for Nicholas Moore's book of poems The Glass Tower, published in 1944. The title page, designed by Freud, shows a sinister head, half-bird, half-human, staring from a window of an encrusted castle or tower. Freud's idiosyncratic lettering here and on the dustjacket and spine develops the spiky forms of Landscape with Birds, 1940 (private collection), in that the letters are given claws, feathers and beaks, not to mention fishbones, fishtails and teeth. The poems themselves are complimented by Freud's beautifully spare line drawings of, among other things, sea shells, seabirds (including a gull based on Thomas Bewick's Great Blacked-Back Gull), dead monkeys, an eagle, and a hybrid head of a zebra and a unicorn. The result is not unlike a medieval bestiary, though without the latter's moral import. The cover of the book is embellished with a drawing of a palm tree that Freud had brought from a nursery garden. The same plant reappears in The Painter's Room, 1944 (private collection) and, more menacingly, in Interior in Paddington, 1951 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) The Glass Tower was published by the magazine Poetry London, one of whose covers Freud had decorated with a drawing of a lyre bird (the magazine's symbol)' (see R. Calvocoressi, exhibition catalogue, Early Works Lucian Freud, Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 1997, p. 14).

Fern is illustrated on page 89 of the book.