Lucian Freud

Although best known for his insightful portraits of the human animal, the study of nature has always fascinated Lucian Freud and played an important role in his work. Amongst his earliest masterpieces were breathtaking images like Dead Rabbit on a Chair and Dead Heron; works devoted entirely to non-human subjects yet rendered with the same painstaking degree of minute detail found in his most psychologically compelling human portraits.

Throughout his life, Freud has always turned to his immediate surroundings for inspiration, whether in the form of his close friends and family or his home and studio. As the title suggests, Another Dead Bat was the second time that he had painted this subject, the first time being a year earlier in Landscape with Bat. Here again the landscape is that of his own garden which is rendered in minute detail appropriate to the delicacy and scale of the subject.  Importantly it reflects a working method guided still by events in his life much as they had been with the earliest paintings of dead animals nearly forty years earlier, which had been given to him by his girlfriend of the time, Lorna Wishart.

One of the distinguishing factors of all Freud's paintings, whether it be portraits, landscapes or still-lifes, is their acute sense of objective realism and the fullness of being they contain. This he achieves by subjecting all aspects of every motif to the same high levels of intense scrutiny, from his sitters to their clothing to the smallest detail of his studio surroundings. This commitment to the entirety of each subject is particularly apparent in the present work, in which the pebbled earth and clover leaves of the undergrowth are rendered with the same exquisite detail as the underbelly of the bat. Using a coarse brush, Freud achieves a delicately textured surface of minute peaks of impasto which emulate the creature's fur, contrasting with the glossy application of the wings. This immaculate detail given to every element has been a feature of his work from the very beginning. The mattress and yellow towelling bathrobe in Girl with a White Dog for example, or the Yucca plant and red carpet in Interior in Paddington 1951, are every bit as memorable and emotionally resonant as the human subjects. His unrivalled facility with paint enables him to give every inch and surface of the canvas a character peculiar to itself, yet which can come together in harmony to manifest images of intense visual power.