Lot Essay
This exquisitely intimate portrait is testimony to a remarkable relationship between the foremost figurative painters of their generation, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, and the incisive vision of their mutual friend, the photographer John Deakin. Deakin's phenomenal output as a photographer for Vogue magazine, encompassing fashion, beauty and portrait sittings, coupled with his private documentary pursuits, made this quiet, unassuming man one of the major visual documentors of the artistic community in 1950s London. His photographs served as the basis for many of Francis Bacon's most celebrated paintings, as the painter felt inhibited to paint directly from the model and thus used Deakin's photographic images of his closest entourage to gain a more critical distance. Photographs of George Dyer, Muriel Belcher, Isabelle Rawsthorne, Henrietta Moraes and Lucian Freud were found lying, dog-eared and splattered with paint, on Bacon's studio floor after his death in 1992. These prints, all taken by Deakin, were as much a part of Bacon's visual alphabet as Velasquez's celebrated portrait of Pope Innocent X, from which his Screaming Pope series was derived.
Lucian Freud, like Bacon, almost exclusively painted, and continues to paint, only his closest companions. In sharp contrast to Bacon, however, Freud always felt the actual presence of his sitters to be essential to his craft. The probing vision of this artist and the almost obsessive attention to detail his works displays, combine to create far more than a precisely crafted effigy, rather they strive towards creating an eery presence of the sitter, as if an aspect of their soul had been captured on canvas.
Initially a prodigiously and precauciously gifted draughtsman, Freud took late to feeling assured in handling paint. Though the work of his early twenties displays all the mastery and talent which was to suffuse his subsequent work, its technique is still firmly rooted in the practice of drawing. Once he abandoned the soft, pliant sable brush, which so literally translated his vision, for the hard, springy bristles of the hog-hair brush, a new and altogether more painterly style emerged. The paint was now dragged across the surface of the canvas more loosely, each individual hog hair now leaving its mark. This sense of controlled randomness, which recalls the factura of a painter like Frans Hals or Eduard Manet, was accompanied by a shift towards the three-dimensional, towards the muscles and tendons and the surface beneath the skin:
Freud's Portrait of John Deakin condenses in its small scale all the monumentality of one of his larger nude paintings. Characteristically unsettling in its frankness, this portrait does not aim at flattery; the large protruding ears, coarse jaw and bulbous nose of Deakin's face are treated with equal curiousity. Freud is not interested in a polite depiction of his subject, though he never oversteps the boundaries of respect towards it. Whereas Freud's nudes are truly naked, in the sense that they seem to reveal all their vulnerability instead of providing sensuality, his portrait of John Deakin seems to equally lay bare and celebrate the sitter's self-conscious introspection. His empty stare, no doubt the result of interminable sittings with the artist, and the inquisitive tilt of his head, together give the impression of a relaxed and open stance of the sitter, who for once has given up his position as the documentor to be himself the subject of documentation. Like Freud himself, Deakin was always questioning and pushing himself towards his own, very personal goals, regardless of what the fashion of the time might have dictated. As Bruce Bernard said about him: "He really was a member of photography's unhappiest minority whose members, while doubting its status as art, sometimes prove better than anyone else that there is no doubt about it."
(In: John Deakin, Robin Muir, London 1996, p. 10).
Lucian Freud, like Bacon, almost exclusively painted, and continues to paint, only his closest companions. In sharp contrast to Bacon, however, Freud always felt the actual presence of his sitters to be essential to his craft. The probing vision of this artist and the almost obsessive attention to detail his works displays, combine to create far more than a precisely crafted effigy, rather they strive towards creating an eery presence of the sitter, as if an aspect of their soul had been captured on canvas.
Initially a prodigiously and precauciously gifted draughtsman, Freud took late to feeling assured in handling paint. Though the work of his early twenties displays all the mastery and talent which was to suffuse his subsequent work, its technique is still firmly rooted in the practice of drawing. Once he abandoned the soft, pliant sable brush, which so literally translated his vision, for the hard, springy bristles of the hog-hair brush, a new and altogether more painterly style emerged. The paint was now dragged across the surface of the canvas more loosely, each individual hog hair now leaving its mark. This sense of controlled randomness, which recalls the factura of a painter like Frans Hals or Eduard Manet, was accompanied by a shift towards the three-dimensional, towards the muscles and tendons and the surface beneath the skin:
Freud's Portrait of John Deakin condenses in its small scale all the monumentality of one of his larger nude paintings. Characteristically unsettling in its frankness, this portrait does not aim at flattery; the large protruding ears, coarse jaw and bulbous nose of Deakin's face are treated with equal curiousity. Freud is not interested in a polite depiction of his subject, though he never oversteps the boundaries of respect towards it. Whereas Freud's nudes are truly naked, in the sense that they seem to reveal all their vulnerability instead of providing sensuality, his portrait of John Deakin seems to equally lay bare and celebrate the sitter's self-conscious introspection. His empty stare, no doubt the result of interminable sittings with the artist, and the inquisitive tilt of his head, together give the impression of a relaxed and open stance of the sitter, who for once has given up his position as the documentor to be himself the subject of documentation. Like Freud himself, Deakin was always questioning and pushing himself towards his own, very personal goals, regardless of what the fashion of the time might have dictated. As Bruce Bernard said about him: "He really was a member of photography's unhappiest minority whose members, while doubting its status as art, sometimes prove better than anyone else that there is no doubt about it."
(In: John Deakin, Robin Muir, London 1996, p. 10).