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Lot Essay
Painted in 1960, Lucian Freud’s Annie is one of the artist’s earliest portraits of one of his children. The titular subject is his eldest daughter, Annie Freud. Annie is an intimate work, capturing the flush and glow of its sitter, her vitality and force. The intense, rich modelling recalls the techniques of artists such as Gustave Courbet and Théodore Géricault, whose paintings Freud had long admired on the walls of the National Gallery in London. With a limited palette of red, deep brown, and peachy pink, he distils the essence of his daughter using just a few eloquent strokes of a hog-hair paintbrush. Previously owned by Annie’s grandmother Kathleen Garman, Lady Epstein, it is a picture of immediacy and warmth.
Where Freud’s earlier portraits, such as those of Annie’s mother Kitty, were carefully-calculated renderings, Annie marks a stylistic shift that was upending his practice towards the end of the 1950s. In Girl with Roses (1947-1948), for example, Freud had captured the tiniest detail—a flash of light, a lock of hair—with the delicate, devoted precision of the neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres: an important influence for the young artist. This meticulous, hard-edged technique, however, gradually yielded to ever-fleshier oils; by the time he painted Annie, Freud had embraced a more corporeal approach. His shift towards painterly physicality was inspired by his close friendship with Francis Bacon, whose contorted figures were visceral and potent. ‘He talked a great deal about the paint itself,’ Freud later remembered, ‘carrying the form and imbuing the paint with this sort of life. He talked about packing a lot of things into one single brushstroke, which amused and excited me ... the idea of paint having that power’ (L. Freud, quoted in W. Feaver, ‘Beyond Feeling’, Lucian Freud, exh. cat., Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 1993, p. 13). Annie witnesses this new vitality in Freud’s work: in charged, economical caresses of pigment, he immortalises his daughter.
Where Freud’s earlier portraits, such as those of Annie’s mother Kitty, were carefully-calculated renderings, Annie marks a stylistic shift that was upending his practice towards the end of the 1950s. In Girl with Roses (1947-1948), for example, Freud had captured the tiniest detail—a flash of light, a lock of hair—with the delicate, devoted precision of the neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres: an important influence for the young artist. This meticulous, hard-edged technique, however, gradually yielded to ever-fleshier oils; by the time he painted Annie, Freud had embraced a more corporeal approach. His shift towards painterly physicality was inspired by his close friendship with Francis Bacon, whose contorted figures were visceral and potent. ‘He talked a great deal about the paint itself,’ Freud later remembered, ‘carrying the form and imbuing the paint with this sort of life. He talked about packing a lot of things into one single brushstroke, which amused and excited me ... the idea of paint having that power’ (L. Freud, quoted in W. Feaver, ‘Beyond Feeling’, Lucian Freud, exh. cat., Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 1993, p. 13). Annie witnesses this new vitality in Freud’s work: in charged, economical caresses of pigment, he immortalises his daughter.