Man and bird in landscape

Man and bird in landscape presents a rare example of Lucian Freud's early style and his pre-occupation with ‘birds’ during a period dominated by drawing. The present lot was executed 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 and bird in landscape depicts a profile of a man who dominates the work and is intensely lost in the surrounding landscape with a bird sitting before him. In his early work Freud was attracted to animals and as a boy he had drawn ‘bird people’. In the late 1940s he kept a pair of sparrow hawks in his studio. Freud always had an interest in birds, perhaps dating back to his early encounters with the works of Albrecht Dürer. The subject's intense concentration is juxtaposed against a wealth of movement, manifested by the bird finely balancing on a branch, beyond, a horse is seen charging down a hillside. The loose, energetic brushstrokes in the background suggest a sense of speed and the lightness of the young Freud's fingers. 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 and bird in landscape offers the rare insight into the fertile imagination of a young man’s mind at the beginning of his journey to become one of the most important British figurative artists of the Twentieth Century.