Man in a Spotted Jacket

Man in a Spotted Jacket presents a rare example of Lucian Freud's early paintings in a period predominated by drawing. The present lot was painted in 1942, when Freud was twenty years old and was studying at Goldsmiths' College in London. He had started painting in Germany at the age of ten before his family moved to England in 1933. Freud's work was first introduced to the English public as a teenager in April 1940 in Cyril Connolly's magazine Horizon. In this period, his pictorial impulses and illustrative repertoire were fostered by imaginative writing drawn from comic strips, stories, newspaper articles and humorous verse. The dream like quality found in Man in a Spotted Jacket depicts a close cropping of a man who dominates the canvas and is intensely gazing back in stillness drawn in the context of the sobriety of the Second World War. The subject's intense concentration is juxtaposed against a wealth of movement, manifested by the boy's richly textured doublet crafted with precise contours. The loose, energetic brushstrokes in the background suggest a sense of speed and the lightness of the young Freud's fingers. Depth and shadow are precisely rendered, each contour crisp and crafted against perpendicular hatched lines. Freud's emphasis on various textures oscillate between the sharp crinkled contracting lines of the man's hair, towards the soft modeling of each strand of thread on the collar, against the blotches of ink on the jacket. The work communicates a sense of vulnerability and youth in both subject matter and style. With hindsight this image reveals a natural progression towards Freud's subsequent practice of etching and engraving in Paris as well as his later expressions in paint. Man in a Spotted Jacket offers the rare insight into the fertile imagination of a young boy's mind at the beginning of his journey to become one of the most important British figurative artists of the twentieth century.