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On a trip to Greece with his children, Freud took with him watercolours, a medium which he had not explored before. The resulting images are incredibly immediate and intimate portraits of his children. Head and crouching or extended bodies were depicted in subtle tones of green, tan and amber. It is telling that in 1954, some seven years earlier, Freud had abandoned drawing as a medium, feeling that the linear component of his pictures was too dominant. In the meantime, as is clear in these watercolours, he began to focus on capturing a sense of the mass of his subjects through an accumulation of colour and form on the surface. Loose, painterly, abstracted washes replaced earlier incisive linearity, and monumentality and form took the place of characterisation and detail.

Lucian Freud (b. 1922)

Head of a Child II

Details

Lucian Freud (b. 1922)
Head of a Child II
watercolour on paper
13 1/8 x 9½in. (33.6 x 24.1cm.)
Executed in 1961

Provenance

Marlborough Fine Art, London (XLOL3955).

Literature

N. Penny, R. Flynn Johnson, Lucian Freud, Works on Paper, London 1988, no. 34 (illustrated in colour, unpaged).

Exhibited

London, Hayward Gallery, Lucian Freud: Works on Paper, May-June 1988, no. 34 (illustrated in colour, unpaged). This exhibition later travelled to Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, May-June 1988; Edinburgh, Fruitmarket Gallery, June-July 1988; Hull, Ferens Art Gallery, July-August 1988; Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, September-October 1980; Exeter, Royal Albert Memorial Museum, October-November 1988 and San Francisco, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, December 1988-February 1989.

Special Notice

Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent. VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 15% on the buyer's premium

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