Lucian Freud, 1922–2011

last updated 8 January 2015

Lucian Freud was not one to rush. Sue Tilley, a morbidly obese British civil servant, posed for him for nine months, lying naked on a couch. “He was seeking perfection right up to the moment he finished,” she later said. The resulting painting, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, sold in 2008 for nearly $34 million, a record for any living artist.

Born in Berlin to the architect son of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and the daughter of a wealthy merchant, Freud moved to England as a boy with his family, in 1933. He enrolled in art school and was recognized early on as a prodigy. In postwar London, he began to develop his distinctive style, characterized by thick brushwork, a muted palette, and a brutally honest, often unsettling approach to his subjects. His nudes “took on a fleshiness and mass,” said The New York Times, and his subjects’ faces were often etched with “fatigue, distress, and torpor.” His personal life more than made up for any color his paintings lacked, said the London Telegraph. Freud “consorted with both high and low society” and earned a reputation as “a rake, a snob, and a Lothario.” Married and divorced twice, he is rumored to have fathered as many as 40 illegitimate children.

Freud was long celebrated at home as a master, said The Washington Post, but it wasn’t until a “watershed” 1987 exhibition at Washington, D.C.’s Hirshhorn Museum that the “Freud cult” spread to the U.S. Time critic Robert Hughes called Freud “the greatest living realist painter,” and in 1993 New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art held a retrospective of his work. “He lived to paint, and painted until the day he died,” his art dealer said.