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Lot Essay
The present work is a very rare fragment from Lucian Freud’s famous early sketchbook: The Freud-Schuster Book.
The sketchbook itself was given to the artist by the poet and novelist, Stephen Spender, when he joined Freud and fellow art student, David Kentish, at Capel Curig in Snowdonia in January 1940. There, they spent long winter evenings in a miner’s cottage, Freud filling the blank pages of his new sketchbook with line drawings, while Spender worked on his novel, The Backward Son, and Kentish smoked a cigar to the sound of Wagner on the gramophone. The collaborative nature of the book is indicated by the fact that Freud and Spender named it ‘The Freud-Schuster Book’. Schuster was Spender’s mother’s maiden name. Indeed, in a letter to Spender following the visit to Wales, Freud inscribed an amusing motto: ‘If Freud catcheth a rooster, half of it belongeth to Schuster’ (Lucian Freud quoted in Love Lucian, London, 2022, p. 42). The book contained texts, drawings, jokes, poems by Spender, and portraits of Freud’s mother which would foreshadow his great series of portraits of the 1970s and 1980s.
The overall impression as one turns the pages of the book is one of youthful inventiveness, movement and wit, as seen with the present work. Freud was influenced by Surrealism at this time, having been exposed to the movement in London in the late 1930s. He was inspired by the Surrealists' metamorphic fantasy, exotic birds, and meticulous depiction of farmyard animals in early Miró, as seen in his rendering of the horses in the present work.
Drawing as an independent practice - as opposed to drawing as a preparatory study for a painting - was fundamental to Freud’s development as an artist and is central to his early work. Speaking about these drawings, Freud remarked: ‘I would have thought I did 200 drawings to every painting in those early days. I very much prided myself on my drawing’ (Lucian Freud quoted in Sebastian Smee, Lucian Freud: Drawings 1940, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, 2003, p. 16).
The sketchbook itself was given to the artist by the poet and novelist, Stephen Spender, when he joined Freud and fellow art student, David Kentish, at Capel Curig in Snowdonia in January 1940. There, they spent long winter evenings in a miner’s cottage, Freud filling the blank pages of his new sketchbook with line drawings, while Spender worked on his novel, The Backward Son, and Kentish smoked a cigar to the sound of Wagner on the gramophone. The collaborative nature of the book is indicated by the fact that Freud and Spender named it ‘The Freud-Schuster Book’. Schuster was Spender’s mother’s maiden name. Indeed, in a letter to Spender following the visit to Wales, Freud inscribed an amusing motto: ‘If Freud catcheth a rooster, half of it belongeth to Schuster’ (Lucian Freud quoted in Love Lucian, London, 2022, p. 42). The book contained texts, drawings, jokes, poems by Spender, and portraits of Freud’s mother which would foreshadow his great series of portraits of the 1970s and 1980s.
The overall impression as one turns the pages of the book is one of youthful inventiveness, movement and wit, as seen with the present work. Freud was influenced by Surrealism at this time, having been exposed to the movement in London in the late 1930s. He was inspired by the Surrealists' metamorphic fantasy, exotic birds, and meticulous depiction of farmyard animals in early Miró, as seen in his rendering of the horses in the present work.
Drawing as an independent practice - as opposed to drawing as a preparatory study for a painting - was fundamental to Freud’s development as an artist and is central to his early work. Speaking about these drawings, Freud remarked: ‘I would have thought I did 200 drawings to every painting in those early days. I very much prided myself on my drawing’ (Lucian Freud quoted in Sebastian Smee, Lucian Freud: Drawings 1940, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, 2003, p. 16).