Lucian Freud

Lefevre Gallery, London
Ian and Jane Phillips, London
Mr and Mrs Paolo Secchi, Modena (by descent from the above)
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

London, Lefevre Gallery, New Paintings and Drawings by Lucian Freud, Felix Kelly and Julian Trevelyan, 1944, no. 11
London, Hayward Gallery; Bristol City Art Gallery; Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery; Leeds City Museum and Art Gallery, Lucian Freud, 1974, p. 8 and p. 43, no. 14, illustrated
London, Hayward Gallery, Lucian Freud, 1988, no. 9
Oxford, Ashmolean Museum; Edinburgh, The Fruitmarket Gallery; Hull, Ferens Art Gallery; Liverpool,  Walker Art Gallery; Exeter, Royal Albert Memorial Museum; San Francisco, The Fine Arts Museum; Minneapolis Institute of Art; New York, Brooke Alexander Gallery; Cleveland Museum of Art; The Saint Louis Art Museum, Lucian Freud Works on Paper, 1988-1989, no. 9, illustrated in colour
Rome, Palazzo Ruspoli; Milan, Castello Sforzesca; Liverpool, Tate Gallery, Lucian Freud, Paintings and Works on Paper 1940-1991, 1991-92, p. 76, no. 49, illustrated in colour
Tochiyi, Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts; Nishinomiya, Otani Memorial Art Museum; Tokyo, Steagaya Art Museum; Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales; Perth, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Lucian Freud, 1992-93, no. 47, illustrated in colour
New York, Robert Miller Gallery, Lucian Freud: Early Works, 1993-94
London, Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, Lucian Freud: Early Works 1940-58, 2008, p. 13, no. 3, illustrated in colour

Horizon, May 1943, Vol. VII, p. 41, illustrated
Lawrence Gowing, Lucian Freud, London, 1982, no. 30, illustrated
Bruce Bernard & Derek Birdsall, Lucian Freud, London, 1996, no. 30, illustrated in colour
William Feaver, Lucian Freud, New York 2007, no. 25, illustrated in colour
Sebastian Smee & Richard Calvocoressi, Lucian Freud on Paper, London 2008, no. 44, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is slightly cooler in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The right side is hand cut, close inspection reveals areas of pin-sized foxing throughout.
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"Freud's drawings in 1943 and 1944 have already a quality of resolved classical line, with the minimum of inflexions to make legible its formal message, which is otherwise the property only of the very best painters of twenty years before" (Lawrence Gowing, Lucian Freud, London 1982, pp. 20-21).

Representing a veritable anthology of Lucian Freud's formative interests, the prodigious Cacti and Stuffed Bird is a work of singular accomplishment across the artist's corpus of remarkable early drawings. Described by Lawrence Gowing as "not quite like anything in Freud's own work", the eccentric juxtaposition of a taxidermy bird framed by a multitude of potted plants and cacti is precisely relayed with remarkable resolve and a mastery of minimal and concise line (Lawrence Gowing, Lucian Freud, London 1982, p. 24). Belonging to the very incipit of Freud's extraordinary oeuvre, this superb drawing foretells Freud's famous assertion: "a painter's tastes must grow out of what so obsesses him in life that he never has to ask himself what is suitable for him to do in art" (the artist in: 'Some thoughts on painting', Encounter, July 1954, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 23-24). Frequently recurrent throughout Freud's career, animals and birds occupy a notably privileged position. Testament to an extraordinary degree of psychological intensity and penetrating visual scrutiny equivalent to that of his human subjects, Cacti and Stuffed Bird is prophetic of the many depictions of plants and taxidermy or dead animals that were to shortly follow. Executed in 1943 when the artist was only 20 years of age, this work notably pronounces a growth in conviction and ushers in Freud's signature 'maximum scrutiny' of subject, laying the foundation for the sustained and penetrative analysis that would furnish his transition to painting in the latter half of the decade. Included in Freud's first ever show at the Lefevre Gallery in 1944 and substantially displayed in major Lucian Freud exhibitions ever since, Cacti with Stuffed Bird is an exemplary and iconic manifestation of Freud's precocious emerging talent as a draughtsman.

Coinciding with the completion of Freud's foundational training at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, Cacti and Stuffed Bird pronounces a developmental turning point in the increasingly confident deployment of classical line whilst simultaneously revealing a host of the artist's formative interests. Between the years 1939 and 1942 Freud intermittently attended the programme founded by the British painters Arthur Lett-Haines and Cedric Morris, and it was the influence of the latter that profoundly impacted the artist's early style. Morris was the subject of one of Freud's very earliest painted portraits, Morris' fondness for people, horticulture and wildlife, particularly birds, may have inspired the young Freud and his choice of subject. As outlined by Richard Calvocoressi, "one suspects that it was the unfussy, even severe quality of some of Morris's portraits, their formality and lack of sentimentality, that impressed Freud the most" (Richard Calvocoressi, 'Introduction', in: Exhibition Catalogue, Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Lucian Freud: Early Works, 1997, p. 16). It was upon a visit to see Morris in 1943 that Freud executed this very drawing after a still-life arrangement Morris had himself set up to paint. With this in mind, Cacti and Stuffed Bird takes on a totemic significance as perhaps the precedent for the corpus of still-life drawings after taxidermy and dead animals that proliferated in Freud's production from 1943 onwards.

From an early age Freud maintained a profound keenness for animals, and particularly birds: "I have always been excited by birds.  If you touch wild birds it's a marvellous feeling" (the artist cited in: William Feaver, 'Lucian Freud: Life into Art', in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Britain, Lucian Freud, 2002, p. 23).  Famously, Freud kept two sparrowhawks in his Paddington studio during the later 1940s and amassed an impressive collection of taxidermy animals including the famous zebra head "bought for him at Rowland Ward's, the taxidermists, by his married girlfriend Lorna Wishart." (William Feaver, Lucian Freud, New York, 2007, p. 16). Aunt to Kitty Garman, the daughter of Jacob Epstein and Freud's future wife, Wishart also bought him objects from her country home, among them the impressively emblematic dead heron from Freud's eponymous 1945 painting. Indeed, also pervading his illustrations for Nicholas Moore's 1944 anthology of poems, The Glass Tower, birds signify a genuine trademark of Freud's early career.

During the crucially formative 1940s the early graphic works represent a wholly independent discipline, if not the principal artistic concern of Freud's practice. Executed with a fastidious, almost inhibited treatment of line and restrained delicacy of shading, Cacti and Stuffed Bird nonetheless broadcasts an intense rapport between bird and plant; thus evincing Freud's interest in the relationship between ostensibly incongruent and irreconcilable subjects that would continue unabated throughout his lifetime. Indeed, there lies a curious parity between the preserved taxidermy of Cacti and Stuffed Bird and the meta-narrative of Freud's artistic practice: to quote William Feaver, Freud's work speaks of a "desire to preserve life... to keep the instant sustained" (Ibid., p. 8).