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Lucian Freud was born in Berlin, but in 1933 his Jewish family fled to Britain to escape the Nazis; his grandfather, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, refused to leave Berlin until 1938, when he finally joined the rest of his family in London. After training in several schools, in the 1940s Lucian Freud emerged in the circle of Francis Bacon as a surrealist artist committed to representation. By the 1950s he had become a figurative painter with an uncompromising eye. His paintings of this period are tightly handled and evoke the almost miniaturist quality of early Netherlandish painting but with an unmistakable air of tension or malaise that betrays their origins in postwar Europe. He explored portraiture regularly but his sitters are often not named and instead are given generic titles, such as in this portrait where the young woman is scrutinized with an unsparing intensity and defined simply as a “girl in a dark dress.”

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016

Lucian Freud is the grandson of Sigmund Freud, who moved his entire family to England in 1932, when Lucian was ten years old. Apart from brief periods as a student at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, Dedham, and sojourns in Paris and Greece, Freud has lived and worked for most of his career in Paddington, a neighborhood of inner West London, whose postwar seediness has in that long period gradually given way to extremes of gentrification. This introspective, flat, closely-observed portrait of Freud's first wife, Kitty Garman, the daughter of Jacob Epstein, is typical of his early portraits, which owe something to the postwar trend that was for a while called "Neo-Romanticism," but that Freud gradually set aside, turning instead to more painterly techniques, and larger, more ambitious figure subjects. Robert Hughes has called these early, crystalline portraits from the late 1940s and early 1950s "tender, edgy, hotel-bound, absorbed, delirious in escape, and vulnerable to intrusion."

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2010