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Lot Essay
A masterpiece of human observation, and an icon of twentieth-century art, Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau) (1981-1983) stands among the defining achievements of Lucian Freud’s oeuvre. Representing his grand magnum opus of the 1980s, its monumental scale, unprecedented ambition and extraordinary technical virtuosity heralded a thrilling new era in the artist’s practice, marking the dawn of what would come to be widely recognized as his greatest period. Spanning almost two meters in both height and width, the work was Freud’s largest painting to date at the time, and his first canvas to feature more than two sitters. It was also the first of only a handful of works to engage directly with a painting from art history: namely Jean Antoine Watteau’s Pierrot content (circa 1712; Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid). Transposing the French master’s fête galante to the interior of his studio, Freud replaces Watteau’s commedia dell’arte cast with a line-up of some of his favorite muses, seating lovers and offspring side by side. “The link,” he said, “is me” (quoted in Lucian Freud, exh. cat., Tate Britain, London, 2002, p. 37). It is a snapshot of his world, and a portrait of the act of looking at it, every inch of its surface animated by the raw, piercing scrutiny of the artist’s gaze.
Perhaps more than any other work in Freud’s oeuvre, the painting dramatizes his central ideas about art. Freud’s works were neither narrative nor symbolic: his interests began and ended solely with the vital intricacies of the person or object that lay before him. His meticulously-wrought surfaces told only the story of his eye and hand, capturing the elusive sensations of coming to know the world through paint. Watteau’s tableau—a parable of jealous affection played out through theatrical archetypes—offered the perfect foil. While Freud’s complex personal life was arguably ripe for translation—his grouping brings together former lover Suzy Boyt, her son Kai, the artist’s own daughter Bella and his then-lover Celia Paul—the work is not, at heart, a portrait of family drama. His muses, though clothed in costume-like garments and shrouded in near-cinematic suspense, are not coded with extrinsic meaning. They are there, instead, as intensely-observed instances of the human condition, their huddled forms living and breathing through every brush stroke. The power of paint to seal the world alive—from the light that dances in the figures’ eyes, to the near-audible stream of the running tap—is the work’s true subject. Its composition, more rich and multifaceted than ever before, is a powerful assertion of the artist’s prowess: even in the guise of theater, Freud proclaims, his work never loses its grip on the visceral reality of seeing.
Originally held for fifteen years in the personal collection of Freud’s dealer James Kirkman before being acquired by Paul G. Allen, the work bears a distinguished history. Before it was even finished, it featured on the cover of Lawrence Gowing’s seminal 1982 book: the first major monograph on Freud’s practice. The text concluded with an account of the painting in progress: “as I write,” he explained, “each [expression] is resolving in the painter’s hands, and each in its own way” (quoted in L. Gowing, Lucian Freud, London, 1982, p. 206). Upon completion, it was unveiled in an historic one-painting exhibition at Thomas Agnew and Sons on Bond Street, its status already canonized: “Lucian Freud Completes His Grand Masterpiece”, ran the announcement in The Times. Since then, the painting has been shown in almost every major exhibition of Freud’s work: from his celebrated touring retrospective organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., in 1987, to his wildly successful solo exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1993, to his landmark retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery, London, the year after his death in 2012, where it occupied pride of place at the entrance to the show.
An avid admirer of the Old Masters—from Rembrandt and Hals to Chardin, Ingres and others—Freud had first encountered Watteau’s painting in a catalogue. The work, an early canvas, offered a pageant of rivalry and courtship: the clown Pierrot sits at the center, giddy from the attention of the two women either side of him, who in turn are flanked by two men competing for their affections. The original, belonging to Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza, was shown at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 1981, as part of a showcase of his collection. Freud was painting a portrait of the Baron at the time, and included a detail of the work in the background of the finished canvas—Portrait of a Man (1981-1982)—wittily placing the Baron’s head in place of Pierrot. Freud had originally intended to make a copy of the painting, and made a preliminary study in 1980; “then I thought, why don’t I do one of my own?” he recalled (quoted in ibid., p. 202). In 1977, the same year that Thyssen acquired the work, Freud had moved into a new studio in Holland Park—the W11 postcode of the present painting’s title. Its upper floor room was both spacious and sparse, its matrix of windows, skylights and blinds offering endless possibilities for careful, tightly-controlled lighting. It was the perfect setting for a challenge of this scale: Freud ordered a fine Dutch canvas, and began to set his stage.
One Sunday in 1981, the artist brought together his chosen muses for the first time. Together, they charted a sizeable portion of his life and work. Suzy Boyt, seated on the right, had first met Freud as a young student at the Slade School of Art in the 1950s: notably, she featured in the pivotal masterwork Woman Smiling (1958-1959), which marked his early embrace of naturalist impasto. Their children Ali, Rose, Ib and Susie would similarly punctuate Freud’s practice, as would Kai—Suzy’s fifth child—whom the artist regarded as a son. The artist Celia Paul, seated on the left, had also met Freud through the Slade, some twenty years after Suzy. Throughout their decade-long relationship she featured in major portraits including Naked Girl with Egg (1980-1981; British Council Collection), Girl in a Striped Nightshirt (1983-1985; Tate, London) and Painter and Model (1986-1987; Private collection), as well as giving birth to Freud’s youngest child Frank the year after the present work. Bella—daughter of Freud’s 1960s muse Bernardine Coverley, and now a celebrated fashion designer—played an equally significant role in his art. Aged twenty at the start of the present work, she had sat for her father since childhood, featuring in ambitious full-length paintings and intimate portrait heads that pushed the artist’s work in bold new directions throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Despite featuring on the cover for the 1985 Dutch translation of David Leavitt’s Family Dancing—a collection of short stories about familial disfunction—Freud’s fragmentary cast was not designed to reconcile his disparate relationships. More simply, it was a reflection of his lifelong predilection for working from those he knew well. “Everything is autobiographical,” he later explained, and—when asked about the link between the present work’s sitters—would state quite plainly that “I’m the connection” (quoted in ibid., p. 202). This understanding was borne out in his method: after Freud had sketched the composition onto canvas, the group never visited the studio en masse again, sitting either in pairs or on their own in long, somewhat irregular sessions. “I didn’t want to make too much about the unity, the fact that people are sitting next to each other, know each other very well, not at all, or slightly,” Freud explained (quoted in W. Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame 1968-2011, London, 2020, p. 154). The figures, in this sense, are largely locked in their own worlds, “rehearsing themselves as themselves” (quoted in ibid., p. 202). As Celia Paul recalls, “when he was with a person, nobody else mattered to him,” and—as such—“all the individuals are sort of isolated in their own inner space” (quoted in P. Hoban, Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open, Seattle, 2014, p. 114). Much like David Hockney’s celebrated 1969 double portrait Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott, they are tethered to one another solely through the force of the artist’s gaze.
Despite this, however, Freud entered spiritedly into the game of mapping his protagonists onto Watteau’s charade. He showed his muses a reproduction of the painting, and explained his intention to create a similar composition, asking each of them to choose old clothes with a “costumey” feel. Kai, clad in yellow, inhabits the position of Pierrot: “he’s the subject,” Freud asserted (quoted in op. cit., 1982, p. 202). Bella, in heels and a striped dress, stands in for Pierrot’s mistress Columbine, her thumb poised upon the mandolin strings in halted serenade. Celia and Suzy, each dressed in florals, turn their bodies inwards, closeting the group: Suzy holds a fan, while Celia rests her hand on Bella’s knee. At one point Freud contemplated adding a figure under the bed, suggesting his early love Lorna Wishart; instead, he placed a child at the feet of the group, originally proposing his granddaughter May before selecting a girl named Star—the little sister of Ali Boyt’s girlfriend. Relegated to the floor, she shatters the fourth wall of Freud’s dreamlike restaging, her gaze meeting the viewer’s and—by extension—the artist’s. Conscious of his precarious liaison with notions of “role play” and “casting”, Freud explained that the child’s function was solely to “break the Watteau”: to banish the realm of fantasy and trope, and to return the viewer to the living dialogue between artist and muse that ultimately lay at the work’s core (quoted in R. Hughes, Lucian Freud: Paintings, London, 2002, p. 14).
Other elements of the composition, too, serve as jolts back into Freud’s world. The enchanting woodland glade of Watteau’s fantasy land becomes the stark interior of the studio, riddled with exposed pipework and bare plaster: Freud deliberately omitted the white tiles around the sink. The artist drew the blinds on all but one of the windows, forcing the unseen skylight to bathe his subjects in an ethereal overhead glow. Beyond, a warped glimpse of the artist’s West London neighbourhood quivers in the distance, replacing—perhaps—the illuminated patch of landscape in Watteau’s scene. Pierrot’s woodland bench becomes an iron bedstead, acquired by Freud in 1977 for £7 at a house sale: originally from the servants’ quarters, and broken over time, it barely accommodates its subjects, forcing them into squashed proximity. Watteau’s fountain becomes a running tap: the only hint of movement in an otherwise frozen scene, “counteracting”—suggests Angus Cook—“the dryness of the paint” (“seeing things,” in Lucian Freud: Recent Drawings and Etchings, exh. cat., Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, 1993, n.p.). Watteau’s trees, meanwhile, are reduced to the tangled remains of an indoor plant that Freud had chopped down: variously identified as a verbena or a pelargonium, its anthropomorphic form threatens to engulf the group entirely.
Beyond these acts of staging, however, it is in the work’s painstaking, meticulous surface that Freud’s rewriting is most keenly felt. Flecks of Cremnitz white pick out shafts of light upon Kai’s nose and Bella’s collarbone; the bristles of his hog’s hair brush comb their way through Celia’s hair, Suzy’s fan and the tasselled hem of Bella’s dress. Every pattern, crease and fold of their clothing is rendered with crisp, focused precision: at times thick with impasto, at others dispersed into a shimmering glaze. Light and life courses through the veins on their intricately-wrought hands and feet, and glows radiantly beneath the shadows on their skin. Fleeting emotional states—melancholy, resolve, pensiveness, uncertainty, longing—flicker across their disconnected faces. The studio and its contents, too, are subject to the same scrutiny. The gleam of the copper piping, the painterly, near-abstract swirl of the plaster, the coarse bristle of the blanket upon the bed: all come alive at the artist’s touch. Freud reportedly relished painting the flowing grain of the floorboards; even the plug socket, once noticed, shines like an object of wonder. It is not the archaic strum of the mandolin but rather the banality of the running tap that becomes the picture’s music, the sound of water hitting enamel dripping its way through every brushstroke. Read as a whole, it is an image of how reality appears under close, extended viewing: vibrant, alive and as endlessly absorbing as any costume play.
Freud’s presence in the work is equally palpable in its internal frame of reference. In the early 1980s, the artist began to take his place on the international stage, featuring in the seminal group exhibition A New Spirit in Painting at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 1981, and receiving a Companion of Honor in 1983. Throughout the ensuing years, his celebrity grew: his debut American retrospective in 1987 led critics to declare him the greatest living realist painter, and—by 1993—queues were forming along Fifth Avenue to gain entrance to his blockbuster show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Poised on the brink of this trajectory, the present work offers something of a retrospective in miniature. Aside from the sitters themselves, other elements of the painting are deeply familiar: the plant, each leaf so vividly and precisely wrought, recalls Freud’s recently-completed botanical triumph Two Plants (1977-1980; Tate, London), famously conceived as hundreds of miniature “portraits” of leaves. The child at Suzy’s feet is curiously reminiscent of her own daughter Ib, who struck a similar pose in the 1968-1969 work Large Interior, Paddington. The view from the window, meanwhile—rendered hazy and dreamlike by the glass—echoes Freud’s haunting urban landscapes from the early 1970s, offering a snapshot of the London locale that became such a vital part of the artist’s existence.
At the same time, however, the work stands as a powerful sign of things to come. The iron bedstead would become the scene of some of Freud’s greatest artistic triumphs, while the sink would feature again in the 1983-1987 painting Two Japanese Wrestlers by a Sink (Art Institute of Chicago). More broadly, however, the work’s challenge ushered in a profound new sense of grandeur and scope that would drive Freud’s practice into extraordinary territory over the next two decades. Its ground-breaking scale—the same size, almost, as his favourite Constable landscapes—paved the way for his legendary large-format portraits of Sue Tilley and Leigh Bowery during the 1990s, the vastness of the canvas elevating their grandiose forms to near-operatic proportions. His embrace of compositional complexity, too, would find continued expression in masterworks such as Large Interior, Notting Hill (1998) and Evening in the Studio (1993), the latter consciously forged in the spirit of the present work’s ambition. Freud would also rekindle his dance with art history on select occasions: a 1992 photograph captures him posing with Leigh Bowery in imitation of Gustave Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio (1855), while the turn of the millennium saw him restage Paul Cezanne’s L'après-midi à Naples (circa 1875) in the unique shaped-canvas painting After Cezanne (2000; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra).
Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau) takes its place within a long lineage of artistic paraphrases: from Pablo Picasso’s takes on Eugène Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (1834), to Francis Bacon’s reworking of Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (circa 1650). Was Freud, as he entered his seventh decade, taking stock of his own art-historical positioning? Perhaps, more plausibly, Watteau was simply another muse. Like everything else his eyes touched, Freud takes full possession of the painting’s pantomime, transforming its whimsical fancy into a clear-sighted expression of how he saw the world. His players are those who, thus far, had accompanied him on the journey, each a painterly incarnation of what it means to know another person. The result, writes Robert Hughes, is “a painting of the most steely concision, a veritable manifesto of Freud’s deeper intentions: to assert, with the utmost plastic force, the advantages of scrutiny over theatre” (Lucian Freud: Paintings, London, 1987, p. 24). Away from the enchanted woodland glade, Freud weaves another kind of magic: a fête galante played out in the courtship of pigment and fiber, preserving the world and those he loved within it.
Perhaps more than any other work in Freud’s oeuvre, the painting dramatizes his central ideas about art. Freud’s works were neither narrative nor symbolic: his interests began and ended solely with the vital intricacies of the person or object that lay before him. His meticulously-wrought surfaces told only the story of his eye and hand, capturing the elusive sensations of coming to know the world through paint. Watteau’s tableau—a parable of jealous affection played out through theatrical archetypes—offered the perfect foil. While Freud’s complex personal life was arguably ripe for translation—his grouping brings together former lover Suzy Boyt, her son Kai, the artist’s own daughter Bella and his then-lover Celia Paul—the work is not, at heart, a portrait of family drama. His muses, though clothed in costume-like garments and shrouded in near-cinematic suspense, are not coded with extrinsic meaning. They are there, instead, as intensely-observed instances of the human condition, their huddled forms living and breathing through every brush stroke. The power of paint to seal the world alive—from the light that dances in the figures’ eyes, to the near-audible stream of the running tap—is the work’s true subject. Its composition, more rich and multifaceted than ever before, is a powerful assertion of the artist’s prowess: even in the guise of theater, Freud proclaims, his work never loses its grip on the visceral reality of seeing.
Originally held for fifteen years in the personal collection of Freud’s dealer James Kirkman before being acquired by Paul G. Allen, the work bears a distinguished history. Before it was even finished, it featured on the cover of Lawrence Gowing’s seminal 1982 book: the first major monograph on Freud’s practice. The text concluded with an account of the painting in progress: “as I write,” he explained, “each [expression] is resolving in the painter’s hands, and each in its own way” (quoted in L. Gowing, Lucian Freud, London, 1982, p. 206). Upon completion, it was unveiled in an historic one-painting exhibition at Thomas Agnew and Sons on Bond Street, its status already canonized: “Lucian Freud Completes His Grand Masterpiece”, ran the announcement in The Times. Since then, the painting has been shown in almost every major exhibition of Freud’s work: from his celebrated touring retrospective organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., in 1987, to his wildly successful solo exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1993, to his landmark retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery, London, the year after his death in 2012, where it occupied pride of place at the entrance to the show.
An avid admirer of the Old Masters—from Rembrandt and Hals to Chardin, Ingres and others—Freud had first encountered Watteau’s painting in a catalogue. The work, an early canvas, offered a pageant of rivalry and courtship: the clown Pierrot sits at the center, giddy from the attention of the two women either side of him, who in turn are flanked by two men competing for their affections. The original, belonging to Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza, was shown at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 1981, as part of a showcase of his collection. Freud was painting a portrait of the Baron at the time, and included a detail of the work in the background of the finished canvas—Portrait of a Man (1981-1982)—wittily placing the Baron’s head in place of Pierrot. Freud had originally intended to make a copy of the painting, and made a preliminary study in 1980; “then I thought, why don’t I do one of my own?” he recalled (quoted in ibid., p. 202). In 1977, the same year that Thyssen acquired the work, Freud had moved into a new studio in Holland Park—the W11 postcode of the present painting’s title. Its upper floor room was both spacious and sparse, its matrix of windows, skylights and blinds offering endless possibilities for careful, tightly-controlled lighting. It was the perfect setting for a challenge of this scale: Freud ordered a fine Dutch canvas, and began to set his stage.
One Sunday in 1981, the artist brought together his chosen muses for the first time. Together, they charted a sizeable portion of his life and work. Suzy Boyt, seated on the right, had first met Freud as a young student at the Slade School of Art in the 1950s: notably, she featured in the pivotal masterwork Woman Smiling (1958-1959), which marked his early embrace of naturalist impasto. Their children Ali, Rose, Ib and Susie would similarly punctuate Freud’s practice, as would Kai—Suzy’s fifth child—whom the artist regarded as a son. The artist Celia Paul, seated on the left, had also met Freud through the Slade, some twenty years after Suzy. Throughout their decade-long relationship she featured in major portraits including Naked Girl with Egg (1980-1981; British Council Collection), Girl in a Striped Nightshirt (1983-1985; Tate, London) and Painter and Model (1986-1987; Private collection), as well as giving birth to Freud’s youngest child Frank the year after the present work. Bella—daughter of Freud’s 1960s muse Bernardine Coverley, and now a celebrated fashion designer—played an equally significant role in his art. Aged twenty at the start of the present work, she had sat for her father since childhood, featuring in ambitious full-length paintings and intimate portrait heads that pushed the artist’s work in bold new directions throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Despite featuring on the cover for the 1985 Dutch translation of David Leavitt’s Family Dancing—a collection of short stories about familial disfunction—Freud’s fragmentary cast was not designed to reconcile his disparate relationships. More simply, it was a reflection of his lifelong predilection for working from those he knew well. “Everything is autobiographical,” he later explained, and—when asked about the link between the present work’s sitters—would state quite plainly that “I’m the connection” (quoted in ibid., p. 202). This understanding was borne out in his method: after Freud had sketched the composition onto canvas, the group never visited the studio en masse again, sitting either in pairs or on their own in long, somewhat irregular sessions. “I didn’t want to make too much about the unity, the fact that people are sitting next to each other, know each other very well, not at all, or slightly,” Freud explained (quoted in W. Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame 1968-2011, London, 2020, p. 154). The figures, in this sense, are largely locked in their own worlds, “rehearsing themselves as themselves” (quoted in ibid., p. 202). As Celia Paul recalls, “when he was with a person, nobody else mattered to him,” and—as such—“all the individuals are sort of isolated in their own inner space” (quoted in P. Hoban, Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open, Seattle, 2014, p. 114). Much like David Hockney’s celebrated 1969 double portrait Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott, they are tethered to one another solely through the force of the artist’s gaze.
Despite this, however, Freud entered spiritedly into the game of mapping his protagonists onto Watteau’s charade. He showed his muses a reproduction of the painting, and explained his intention to create a similar composition, asking each of them to choose old clothes with a “costumey” feel. Kai, clad in yellow, inhabits the position of Pierrot: “he’s the subject,” Freud asserted (quoted in op. cit., 1982, p. 202). Bella, in heels and a striped dress, stands in for Pierrot’s mistress Columbine, her thumb poised upon the mandolin strings in halted serenade. Celia and Suzy, each dressed in florals, turn their bodies inwards, closeting the group: Suzy holds a fan, while Celia rests her hand on Bella’s knee. At one point Freud contemplated adding a figure under the bed, suggesting his early love Lorna Wishart; instead, he placed a child at the feet of the group, originally proposing his granddaughter May before selecting a girl named Star—the little sister of Ali Boyt’s girlfriend. Relegated to the floor, she shatters the fourth wall of Freud’s dreamlike restaging, her gaze meeting the viewer’s and—by extension—the artist’s. Conscious of his precarious liaison with notions of “role play” and “casting”, Freud explained that the child’s function was solely to “break the Watteau”: to banish the realm of fantasy and trope, and to return the viewer to the living dialogue between artist and muse that ultimately lay at the work’s core (quoted in R. Hughes, Lucian Freud: Paintings, London, 2002, p. 14).
Other elements of the composition, too, serve as jolts back into Freud’s world. The enchanting woodland glade of Watteau’s fantasy land becomes the stark interior of the studio, riddled with exposed pipework and bare plaster: Freud deliberately omitted the white tiles around the sink. The artist drew the blinds on all but one of the windows, forcing the unseen skylight to bathe his subjects in an ethereal overhead glow. Beyond, a warped glimpse of the artist’s West London neighbourhood quivers in the distance, replacing—perhaps—the illuminated patch of landscape in Watteau’s scene. Pierrot’s woodland bench becomes an iron bedstead, acquired by Freud in 1977 for £7 at a house sale: originally from the servants’ quarters, and broken over time, it barely accommodates its subjects, forcing them into squashed proximity. Watteau’s fountain becomes a running tap: the only hint of movement in an otherwise frozen scene, “counteracting”—suggests Angus Cook—“the dryness of the paint” (“seeing things,” in Lucian Freud: Recent Drawings and Etchings, exh. cat., Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, 1993, n.p.). Watteau’s trees, meanwhile, are reduced to the tangled remains of an indoor plant that Freud had chopped down: variously identified as a verbena or a pelargonium, its anthropomorphic form threatens to engulf the group entirely.
Beyond these acts of staging, however, it is in the work’s painstaking, meticulous surface that Freud’s rewriting is most keenly felt. Flecks of Cremnitz white pick out shafts of light upon Kai’s nose and Bella’s collarbone; the bristles of his hog’s hair brush comb their way through Celia’s hair, Suzy’s fan and the tasselled hem of Bella’s dress. Every pattern, crease and fold of their clothing is rendered with crisp, focused precision: at times thick with impasto, at others dispersed into a shimmering glaze. Light and life courses through the veins on their intricately-wrought hands and feet, and glows radiantly beneath the shadows on their skin. Fleeting emotional states—melancholy, resolve, pensiveness, uncertainty, longing—flicker across their disconnected faces. The studio and its contents, too, are subject to the same scrutiny. The gleam of the copper piping, the painterly, near-abstract swirl of the plaster, the coarse bristle of the blanket upon the bed: all come alive at the artist’s touch. Freud reportedly relished painting the flowing grain of the floorboards; even the plug socket, once noticed, shines like an object of wonder. It is not the archaic strum of the mandolin but rather the banality of the running tap that becomes the picture’s music, the sound of water hitting enamel dripping its way through every brushstroke. Read as a whole, it is an image of how reality appears under close, extended viewing: vibrant, alive and as endlessly absorbing as any costume play.
Freud’s presence in the work is equally palpable in its internal frame of reference. In the early 1980s, the artist began to take his place on the international stage, featuring in the seminal group exhibition A New Spirit in Painting at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 1981, and receiving a Companion of Honor in 1983. Throughout the ensuing years, his celebrity grew: his debut American retrospective in 1987 led critics to declare him the greatest living realist painter, and—by 1993—queues were forming along Fifth Avenue to gain entrance to his blockbuster show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Poised on the brink of this trajectory, the present work offers something of a retrospective in miniature. Aside from the sitters themselves, other elements of the painting are deeply familiar: the plant, each leaf so vividly and precisely wrought, recalls Freud’s recently-completed botanical triumph Two Plants (1977-1980; Tate, London), famously conceived as hundreds of miniature “portraits” of leaves. The child at Suzy’s feet is curiously reminiscent of her own daughter Ib, who struck a similar pose in the 1968-1969 work Large Interior, Paddington. The view from the window, meanwhile—rendered hazy and dreamlike by the glass—echoes Freud’s haunting urban landscapes from the early 1970s, offering a snapshot of the London locale that became such a vital part of the artist’s existence.
At the same time, however, the work stands as a powerful sign of things to come. The iron bedstead would become the scene of some of Freud’s greatest artistic triumphs, while the sink would feature again in the 1983-1987 painting Two Japanese Wrestlers by a Sink (Art Institute of Chicago). More broadly, however, the work’s challenge ushered in a profound new sense of grandeur and scope that would drive Freud’s practice into extraordinary territory over the next two decades. Its ground-breaking scale—the same size, almost, as his favourite Constable landscapes—paved the way for his legendary large-format portraits of Sue Tilley and Leigh Bowery during the 1990s, the vastness of the canvas elevating their grandiose forms to near-operatic proportions. His embrace of compositional complexity, too, would find continued expression in masterworks such as Large Interior, Notting Hill (1998) and Evening in the Studio (1993), the latter consciously forged in the spirit of the present work’s ambition. Freud would also rekindle his dance with art history on select occasions: a 1992 photograph captures him posing with Leigh Bowery in imitation of Gustave Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio (1855), while the turn of the millennium saw him restage Paul Cezanne’s L'après-midi à Naples (circa 1875) in the unique shaped-canvas painting After Cezanne (2000; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra).
Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau) takes its place within a long lineage of artistic paraphrases: from Pablo Picasso’s takes on Eugène Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (1834), to Francis Bacon’s reworking of Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (circa 1650). Was Freud, as he entered his seventh decade, taking stock of his own art-historical positioning? Perhaps, more plausibly, Watteau was simply another muse. Like everything else his eyes touched, Freud takes full possession of the painting’s pantomime, transforming its whimsical fancy into a clear-sighted expression of how he saw the world. His players are those who, thus far, had accompanied him on the journey, each a painterly incarnation of what it means to know another person. The result, writes Robert Hughes, is “a painting of the most steely concision, a veritable manifesto of Freud’s deeper intentions: to assert, with the utmost plastic force, the advantages of scrutiny over theatre” (Lucian Freud: Paintings, London, 1987, p. 24). Away from the enchanted woodland glade, Freud weaves another kind of magic: a fête galante played out in the courtship of pigment and fiber, preserving the world and those he loved within it.