Head and Shoulders of a Man is in a vivid and intense depiction of one of Lucian Freud’s most important sitters. Raymond Jones enjoyed a three decade long friendship with Freud and is the sitter in Naked Man with Rat (1977) which is now held in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia and has featured in all of this artist’s most important retrospectives. The present work was completed three years prior to that great masterpiece; it captures the precise technique and depictive force that defined this decade of work for Freud, and marks his return to regular work after a difficult and unproductive few years. In it’s appreciation we are reminded of the artist’s declaration: "I want paint to work as flesh...I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them. I didn't want to get just a likeness like a mimic, but to portray them, like an actor. As far as I'm concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does" (cited in: Lawrence Gowing, Lucian Freud, London 1982, pp.190-91).

Raymond Jones first met Freud when he purchased a portrait of George Dyer, the then boyfriend of Francis Bacon. Over the following decades, his striking looks and long pre-Raphaelite hair featured in a number of Freud paintings. The artist turned to Jones not only as a sitter but also to borrow money required to support his growing gambling debts, and in turn introduced him to his circle of artist friends including Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews. Jones was a popular figure in the London scene, regularly dining with the artists at Wheeler’s in Soho. The two caroused together and, in the creation of Naked Man with Rat, famously kept the titularly-referenced rodent docile using a crushed-up painkiller and champagne. The present work is easy to characterise as a night portrait. We notice the pillow behind Jones head, and the dark shadows cast by his chin and his hairline in the electric light. In light of the jolly relationship these men shared, we might also look to the pronounced rosy cheeks of the sitter and imagine a drink shared during each sitting.

Freud’s output slowed considerably in the 1970s, making this work particularly rare even amongst this storied oeuvre. Freud’s father died quite suddenly in 1970 and his mother subsequently entered into a deep depression, even attempting suicide. Freud himself was very affected and felt powerless to paint people for some time, focussing instead on bleak urban landscapes and raw naked portraits of Jacqueta Eliot, a contemporaneous lover. The present work marks his return to his lifelong endeavour of portraiture. The ensuing years would be particularly productive for Freud encompassing such masterpieces as his Portrait of Frank Auerbach and his Self Portrait with a Black Eye.

The present work is replete with the qualities that have made Lucian Freud into the most celebrated British portraitist of the 20^th century. This style was best summed up by Auerbach himself: “When I think of the work of Lucian Freud, I think of Lucian’s attention to his subject. If his concentrated interest were to falter he would come off the tightrope; he has no safety net of manner. Whenever his way of working threatens to become a style, he puts it aside like a blunted pencil and finds a procedure more suited to his needs. I am never aware of the artistic paraphernalia. The subject is raw, not cooked to be more digestible as art, not covered in a gravy of ostentatious tone or colour, and not arrange don the plate as a ‘composition’. The paintings live because their creator has been passionately attentive to their theme, and his attention has left something for us to look at. It seems a sort of miracle.” (Frank Auerbach cited in: William Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame. 1968-2011, London 2020, p. 51).