Head of a Child III

Lucian Freud's Head of a Child III is a rare and intimate example of the artist's use of watercolour, a medium that Freud explored fully for the first time on a trip to Greece with his children. The present work forms part of a group of incredibly tender, immediate portraits of his children executed on this holiday. Canted on an angle, the young girl looks pensively out to the right of the picture plane, her youthfulness mirrored by the soft caress of watercolour 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 Head of a Child III, 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.