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Lot Essay
‘If you look at Chardin’s animals, they’re absolute portraits. It’s to do with the individuality and the intensity of the regard and the focus on the specific. So I think portraiture is an attitude. Painting things as symbols and rhetoric and so on doesn’t interest me’
LUCIAN FREUD
‘Animal ways impress Freud as virtues: their unselfconsciousness, their lack of arrogance, their ready eagerness, their animal pragmatism; and so, in the sense that they are at their most animal-like when resting or sleeping, those who sit for Freud trust him to bring out the animal in them’
WILLIAM FEAVER
‘I’m really interested in people as animals. Part of my liking to work from them naked is for that reason. Because I can see more … I like people to look as natural and as physically at ease as animals, as Pluto my whippet’
LUCIAN FREUD
‘Darkly brown thy body is,
Till the sunshine, striking this,
Alchemize its dulness, —
When the sleek curls manifold
Flash all over into gold,
With a burnished fulness’
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, 'TO FLUSH, MY DOG', 1844
Pluto (1988) is a beautiful, intimate portrait of one of Lucian Freud’s most beloved companions – his whippet, Pluto. She was given to Freud as a puppy by a good friend in 1988, and this is the first painting he made of her. She is peacefully asleep on her side, elegant limbs relaxed, tail tucked neatly between her legs; Freud studies the nuanced tones of her silken, coffee-coloured fur and dark muzzle with infinite care, his brushstrokes seeming to gently stroke her sleeping form. His dealer at the time, James Kirkman, held Pluto as Freud painted. The background is barely sketched, as if she would not stay still enough for him to finish. From kestrels to horses, Freud had always felt a deep affinity for animals, and they informed his near-biological approach to human portraiture. ‘I’m really interested in people as animals’, he said. ‘Part of my liking to work from them naked is for that reason … I like people to look as natural and as physically at ease as animals, as Pluto my whippet’ (L. Freud, quoted in W. Feaver, Lucian Freud, exh. cat. Tate, London 2002, pp. 41-42). Having first painted a dog in his iconic 1951 work Girl with a White Dog, from 1988 he made numerous etchings and paintings of Pluto, lovingly following her growth until she passed away in 2003. A relative of the whippets Joshua and Lilly, who feature alongside their owner in Triple Portrait (1986-87), she was alongside Freud in the studio when he made his celebrated paintings of Leigh Bowery and ‘Big Sue’ in the 1990s. A line drawing of Pluto also became the logo for his daughter Bella Freud’s fashion label. Freud believed that animals could be studied as individuals just as revealingly as humans. ‘If you look at Chardin’s animals,’ he said, ‘they’re absolute portraits. It’s to do with the individuality and the intensity of the regard and the focus on the specific’ (L. Freud, quoted in S. Smee, ‘A Late-Night Conversation with Lucian Freud,’ in Freud at Work, New York 2006, p. 33). Pluto, its tiny canvas replete with personality, warmth and tenderness, amply fulfils this statement. Touchingly, Freud’s final painting (Portrait of the Hound (2011)) would also feature a whippet: Eli, a descendant of Pluto, who Freud had gifted to his assistant David Dawson. Both man and beast kept Freud company in his final years.
There is a jewel-like perfection to the tiny form of Pluto, curled snugly in her blank space. As Martin Gayford has noted of Freud’s technique, ‘His way of working is highly idiosyncratic. Other painters have described it to me as “completely crazy”. Many artists, when embarking on a picture … would first make a loose, all-over sketch, which they would elaborate, refine and sharpen until the whole is finished. LF, on the other hand … is inclined to put a blob in the middle and then slowly work out from it, creating a mosaic pattern of pigment that spreads across the canvas. Though he may later adjust these first thoughts, the sections he paints look fairly “finished” from early on, surrounded by blank white canvas’ (M. Gayford, quoted in N. Cullinan, ‘“Finishing Well”: Lucian Freud’, in Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, exh. cat. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2016, p. 107). Pluto is therefore not only a sensitive document of Freud’s love for his hound, but also a fascinating insight into his painterly method, showing the sharp resolve of his gaze coalescing in lucid concentration against the empty ground. There are a number of other important ‘unfinished’ paintings by Freud that show his process in action: the poignant Last Portrait (1976-77, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza) depicts Freud’s friend Jacquetta Eliot, and was interrupted by the end of their relationship; Freud’s final painting, Portrait of the Hound, was cut short by his own passing. Dawson recalls that ‘Lucian told me he felt Portrait of the Hound could be exhibited’, as ‘if there is enough life in the painting’, the question of finish does not matter (D. Dawson, quoted in N. Cullinan, ‘“Finishing Well”: Lucian Freud’, in Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, exh. cat. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2016, p. 109). This certainly rings true for Pluto, which was halted not by death but by the restless life of a puppy, and remains compelling, poised, and vivid in its unpolished intensity.
LUCIAN FREUD
‘Animal ways impress Freud as virtues: their unselfconsciousness, their lack of arrogance, their ready eagerness, their animal pragmatism; and so, in the sense that they are at their most animal-like when resting or sleeping, those who sit for Freud trust him to bring out the animal in them’
WILLIAM FEAVER
‘I’m really interested in people as animals. Part of my liking to work from them naked is for that reason. Because I can see more … I like people to look as natural and as physically at ease as animals, as Pluto my whippet’
LUCIAN FREUD
‘Darkly brown thy body is,
Till the sunshine, striking this,
Alchemize its dulness, —
When the sleek curls manifold
Flash all over into gold,
With a burnished fulness’
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, 'TO FLUSH, MY DOG', 1844
Pluto (1988) is a beautiful, intimate portrait of one of Lucian Freud’s most beloved companions – his whippet, Pluto. She was given to Freud as a puppy by a good friend in 1988, and this is the first painting he made of her. She is peacefully asleep on her side, elegant limbs relaxed, tail tucked neatly between her legs; Freud studies the nuanced tones of her silken, coffee-coloured fur and dark muzzle with infinite care, his brushstrokes seeming to gently stroke her sleeping form. His dealer at the time, James Kirkman, held Pluto as Freud painted. The background is barely sketched, as if she would not stay still enough for him to finish. From kestrels to horses, Freud had always felt a deep affinity for animals, and they informed his near-biological approach to human portraiture. ‘I’m really interested in people as animals’, he said. ‘Part of my liking to work from them naked is for that reason … I like people to look as natural and as physically at ease as animals, as Pluto my whippet’ (L. Freud, quoted in W. Feaver, Lucian Freud, exh. cat. Tate, London 2002, pp. 41-42). Having first painted a dog in his iconic 1951 work Girl with a White Dog, from 1988 he made numerous etchings and paintings of Pluto, lovingly following her growth until she passed away in 2003. A relative of the whippets Joshua and Lilly, who feature alongside their owner in Triple Portrait (1986-87), she was alongside Freud in the studio when he made his celebrated paintings of Leigh Bowery and ‘Big Sue’ in the 1990s. A line drawing of Pluto also became the logo for his daughter Bella Freud’s fashion label. Freud believed that animals could be studied as individuals just as revealingly as humans. ‘If you look at Chardin’s animals,’ he said, ‘they’re absolute portraits. It’s to do with the individuality and the intensity of the regard and the focus on the specific’ (L. Freud, quoted in S. Smee, ‘A Late-Night Conversation with Lucian Freud,’ in Freud at Work, New York 2006, p. 33). Pluto, its tiny canvas replete with personality, warmth and tenderness, amply fulfils this statement. Touchingly, Freud’s final painting (Portrait of the Hound (2011)) would also feature a whippet: Eli, a descendant of Pluto, who Freud had gifted to his assistant David Dawson. Both man and beast kept Freud company in his final years.
There is a jewel-like perfection to the tiny form of Pluto, curled snugly in her blank space. As Martin Gayford has noted of Freud’s technique, ‘His way of working is highly idiosyncratic. Other painters have described it to me as “completely crazy”. Many artists, when embarking on a picture … would first make a loose, all-over sketch, which they would elaborate, refine and sharpen until the whole is finished. LF, on the other hand … is inclined to put a blob in the middle and then slowly work out from it, creating a mosaic pattern of pigment that spreads across the canvas. Though he may later adjust these first thoughts, the sections he paints look fairly “finished” from early on, surrounded by blank white canvas’ (M. Gayford, quoted in N. Cullinan, ‘“Finishing Well”: Lucian Freud’, in Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, exh. cat. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2016, p. 107). Pluto is therefore not only a sensitive document of Freud’s love for his hound, but also a fascinating insight into his painterly method, showing the sharp resolve of his gaze coalescing in lucid concentration against the empty ground. There are a number of other important ‘unfinished’ paintings by Freud that show his process in action: the poignant Last Portrait (1976-77, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza) depicts Freud’s friend Jacquetta Eliot, and was interrupted by the end of their relationship; Freud’s final painting, Portrait of the Hound, was cut short by his own passing. Dawson recalls that ‘Lucian told me he felt Portrait of the Hound could be exhibited’, as ‘if there is enough life in the painting’, the question of finish does not matter (D. Dawson, quoted in N. Cullinan, ‘“Finishing Well”: Lucian Freud’, in Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, exh. cat. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2016, p. 109). This certainly rings true for Pluto, which was halted not by death but by the restless life of a puppy, and remains compelling, poised, and vivid in its unpolished intensity.