Hare in a Larder

During the war close friends John Craxton and Lucian Freud shared a taste for depicting dead animals. A zebra head came stuffed from Piccadilly and a dead monkey – temporarily entombed in the cooker of their St John’s Wood maisonette studios when National Gallery director Kenneth Clark and his wife came to tea – from a Camden pet shop. Carcases from a local butcher could be eaten after use, but not so the corpses (such as the hare shown here) drawn before post-mortem study by their animal pathologist host on visits to Cambridgeshire. More beastly subjects were to hand when the two artists stayed with painter-designer E.Q. Nicholson (Ben Nicholson’s sister-in-law) at Alderholt mill house in Dorset. The problem was the slow speed of painstaking depiction, which became obsessive in the case of Lucian Freud. When John, Lucian and E.Q. stayed in Swanage during a hot spell in 1944, the smell from a lobster Lucian had been portraying caused the model finally to be flung through a window and onto a nearby roof, where it broke apart and clattered down the tiles in putrid pieces.

I.C.

Like Freud the practice of drawing for Craxton would remain a vital part of his development in the early 1940s. Their trips to Little Shelford, near Cambridge to Dr Peter Bayon provided the young men with new subject matter. Freud’s Chicken on a Bamboo Table of 1944 has a similar format and intensity to the present work, Hare in a Larder.