Lucian Freud

A gift from the artist to the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly warmer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The sheet is attached to the reverse of the mount along the upper edge. There is some very light mount staining along the extreme outer edges. There is an artist pinhole in the top right corner. There are a few minute media accretions scattered in a few places towards the right edge, all of which are visible in the catalogue illustration. Close inspection reveals a few very light and unobtrusive handling creases in places.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Works on paper by Lucian Freud from the Collection of Felicity Hellaby 

Exemplifying Freud’s highly developed faculty for observation, the works from the collection of Felicity Hellaby capture a fascinating insight into the life and work of Britain’s foremost artistic talents of the last one hundred years. In all but one instance, these exquisite works on paper and fascinating letters are revealed for the very first time, having remained in Felicity’s possession for the last seventy years.

Felicity Hellaby and Lucian Freud first met at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham, Essex, established by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines. In the middle of 1940 after the school at Dedham had accidentally burned down (allegedly by Freud), the school moved to new premises at Benton End, a large old house on the outskirts of Hadleigh in Suffolk. At Benton End they would continue to draw and paint each other, and Felicity would become the subject of what was one of Freud’s first full-scale portraits Girl on the Quay, 1941. In a delicate and economical display of line, Felicity is represented in the present collection in the wonderfully intimate and sensitive portrait Felicity. The intimacy of their relationship is further evident in the fascinating letters that Lucian would write to his ‘Darling’ Felicity during their time apart, and they provide a touching illustration of Freud’s idiosyncratic nature. Felicity recalls Freud as “very, very funny, incredibly charming, and there was something about him that made me think, even then, that he was going to do extraordinary things” (Felicity quoted in: Geordie Grieg, Breakfast with Lucian,  London 2013, p. 64).

Significantly though, written barely out of his teens, these letters reveal Freud’s absolute single-minded focus toward his work, and are peppered with references to some of his most renowned works that he was working on at the time. From an early age, Freud maintained a profound fondness for animals, particularly birds. One of the letters, written when Freud was staying at King’s Farm near Cambridge, divulges an illuminating insight into the origins of some of his most celebrated works on paper. Including a highly compelling and witty account of what would later become the work Chicken in a Bucket from 1944. In another, his acquisition of the iconic Zebra’s head that was the protagonist in some of his more surreal work is hailed as: “By far the best thing I have ever bought”. This fascination with animals and birds is no more evident than in the highly accomplished work Untitled (Study of a Bird). Exuding Freud’s capacity for intense and meticulous observation, this work perhaps sets the precedent for the corpus of still life drawings after taxidermy and dead animals that proliferated in his production from 1943 onwards.

It has been written that in Freud’s formative years, he demonstrated in only a short span, the discovery of “most of the themes that would later pre-occupy him: the endlessly intriguing faces of people he knows well; the vitality, even personality, of animals and plants; figures and objects viewed frontally and at close range” (Richard Calvocovessi, Ed., Exhibition Catalogue, Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Lucian Freud: Early Works, 1997, p. 10). Nowhere is this statement truer than in the extraordinary catalogue of works in the present collection.