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Lot Essay
‘You’ve got to try to paint yourself as another person’ (Lucian Freud)
Self-portrait Fragment (circa 1956) was first shown in Lucian Freud’s final solo exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery in London in 1968. Forty-five years passed before it was next seen in public as part of his posthumous retrospective at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna in 2013. It has since been exhibited in the major survey Lucian Freud: The Self-Portraits at the Royal Academy of Arts, London and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (2019-2020), and the landmark centenary exhibition Lucian Freud: New Perspectives at the National Gallery, London and the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (2022-2023). Freud’s face materialises amid open space. The skin’s complexities are mapped in fine, lucent planes of brick red, ochre, blue and green. Sketched lines trace the contours of shoulder, hand and jawline. Painted during the breakdown of the artist’s marriage to Caroline Blackwood, the work might also be seen as an image of dissolution. He touches four fingers to his face as if to verify his presence.
From surreal early works such as Self-portrait (Man with a Feather) (1943) to the vertiginous Reflection with Two Children (Self-portrait) (1965) and the raw, granular full-length nude Painter Working, Reflection (1992-1993), Freud’s self-portraits are formally daring and vary widely in style, marking pivotal moments in his life and work. ‘They form an arc of self-scrutiny in youth, middle age, final years,’ writes Jackie Wullschläger, ‘unfolding, like Rembrandt’s self-depictions, a decade-by-decade personal journey and also the evolution of an endlessly inventive, enthralling painterly manner’ (J. Wullschläger, ‘Lucian Freud: The Self-portraits—enthralling glimpse into a life on canvas’, Financial Times, 18 October 2019). Self-portrait Fragment is emblematic of Freud’s mid-1950s period, which saw him arrive at the intricate, richly worked technique that would become increasingly pronounced over the following decades.
Since the mid-1940s Freud’s paintings had been defined by a graphic exactitude and heightened attention to detail. He would often sit knee-to-knee with his subjects, the painting held in his lap. By the time he painted Self-portrait Fragment, he had begun instead to stand at an easel, and had substituted his fine sable brushes for coarser hog’s-hair. His gaze remained sharp: ‘Sometimes when I’ve been staring too hard’, he told William Feaver, ‘I’ve noticed that I could see the circumference of my own eye’ (L. Freud quoted in W. Feaver, ‘Lucian Freud: Life into Art’, in Lucian Freud, exh. cat. Tate, London 2002, p. 26). Yet the pictures gained a new vitality as their polish gave way to surfaces of nuanced, varied colour, every feature carrying the brushstroke’s charge. In his introduction to Freud’s catalogue raisonné, Toby Treves locates this turning point in the present work. ‘We might imagine that, as he painted Self-portrait Fragment, the shock of the discovery so frightened him that he stopped work on the picture, as if he had heard the sound of breathing come from the figure emerging on the canvas’ (T. Treves, ‘An Introduction’, in C. Lampert and T. Treves, Lucian Freud: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, London 2025, vol. 1, p. 17).
In Freud’s centenary exhibition at the National Gallery, Self-portrait Fragment was hung alongside the contemporaneous unfinished portrait Francis Bacon (1956-1957). The pairing emphasised the impact of Freud’s relationship with Bacon. The two had been friends since the mid-1940s and saw each other almost daily during these years, carousing in Soho, discussing their work and visiting one another’s studios. Freud was living on Dean Street at the time, but also kept his studio in Delamere Terrace in Paddington, where he painted both of these pictures. He was impressed by Bacon’s daring and wit, and by his attitude to paint. It was Bacon who inspired him to loosen the tight control of his early work. ‘He talked a great deal about the paint itself carrying the form,’ Freud remembered, ‘and imbuing the paint with this sort of life; he talked about packing a lot of things into a single brushstroke’ (L. Freud quoted in W. Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth, 1922-68, London 2019, pp. 487-488).
The arrival of Freud’s more freely modelled and expressive approach is palpable in both paintings, with the men’s faces blooming into life amid the amplifying space of the blank canvas. In Self-portrait Fragment each shadow, furrow and gleam—the curve of his aquiline nose, the sparkle of his grey-blue eyes rimmed with white—is at once precisely captured and animated by the brushwork’s texture. Licks of paint indicate flame-like locks of hair. In the lines that sketch the unfinished areas, Freud’s early talent as a draughtsman lingers. With his painting hand pressed to his cheekbone, he records a moment of contact, as if in awe at the union of paint and flesh. Echoing Caroline Blackwood’s pose in the double portrait Hotel Bedroom (1953-1954)—begun on the couple’s honeymoon in Paris—it is perhaps also a gesture of farewell. Freud painted his final portrait of Caroline, Girl by the Sea, in 1956.
Fragmentary works became increasingly frequent in Freud’s oeuvre during the 1950s and would recur throughout his career. Recent years have seen mounting recognition of their importance. The fact that he kept and exhibited these paintings, notes Treves, ‘indicates that Freud saw a unique quality in them, probably to do with that mysterious moment in which life enters a work’ (T. Treves in C. Lampert and T. Treves, ibid., vol. 2, p. 200). They can be seen in the context of the non finito tradition exemplified by the deliberately incomplete sculptures of Michelangelo and Auguste Rodin, who was his favourite sculptor. ‘Nearly all Freud’s figurative paintings’, writes Catherine Lampert, ‘… echo to some degree the corporeal and embraceable qualities of sculpture’ (C. Lampert, ‘Sculpture: A First and Last Love’, in ibid., vol. 1, p. 43). His own unfinished works offer insights into a distinctive working process. The contrast between the present painting’s areas of emptiness and fine finish is typical. Rather than building up an entire picture in layers, Freud would work outwards from the subject’s eyes or another focal point, completing each detail as he went.
The 2025 publication of the catalogue raisonné of Freud’s oil paintings reminds us of the richness and number of self-portraits as a body of work. ‘Fragments’ comprise almost a third of the examples recorded. A similarly partial quality can be found even in the finished self-portraits, many of which present an image that is cropped or obscured: the artist appears among a pot-plant’s leaves, as a slivered profile peering from behind a wall, and as a dark reflection in a hand-mirror. The difficulty of seeing oneself fully is a rich theme in the genre’s history. Rembrandt’s self-portraits vary widely across four decades, becoming playful costume dramas, advertisements of skill or visions of sombre introspection. Joseph Koerner compares Freud’s work to Albrecht Dürer’s unfinished nude self-portrait of circa 1506, in which ‘incompletion testifies to the unique condition of self-portraiture: artists are least visible to themselves. Glimpsed only as a reflection, and mobile when a model should sit still, the artist pursues himself as an elusive stranger’ (J. L. Koerner, ‘The Presence of the Past’, in Lucian Freud: The Self-Portraits, exh. cat. Royal Academy of Arts, London 2019, p. 22).
Freud worked from a mirror for his self-portraits. Speaking to Jake Auerbach, he explained that the process was ‘completely different’ to painting another person. ‘I do start more self-portraits and destroy more than any other pictures because in my case they seem to go wrong so very, very often’, he said. ‘… You can’t see yourself like you can other people.’ Part of the challenge was to approach himself with the same clear-eyed scrutiny that he turned upon his sitters. ‘I try to avoid any expression on my part which seems to me to be viewing oneself in a pleasant or conciliatory light. I notice from self-portraits very often that people tend to give themselves a kind of grandeur—which I’m not saying they haven’t got, but which they certainly don’t give to other people’ (L. Freud in conversation with J. Auerbach, Omnibus, series 25, episode 3, BBC, aired 20 May 1988). Self-portrait Fragment reveals its own grandeur as Freud probes the mysteries of paint, flesh and self.
Self-portrait Fragment (circa 1956) was first shown in Lucian Freud’s final solo exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery in London in 1968. Forty-five years passed before it was next seen in public as part of his posthumous retrospective at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna in 2013. It has since been exhibited in the major survey Lucian Freud: The Self-Portraits at the Royal Academy of Arts, London and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (2019-2020), and the landmark centenary exhibition Lucian Freud: New Perspectives at the National Gallery, London and the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (2022-2023). Freud’s face materialises amid open space. The skin’s complexities are mapped in fine, lucent planes of brick red, ochre, blue and green. Sketched lines trace the contours of shoulder, hand and jawline. Painted during the breakdown of the artist’s marriage to Caroline Blackwood, the work might also be seen as an image of dissolution. He touches four fingers to his face as if to verify his presence.
From surreal early works such as Self-portrait (Man with a Feather) (1943) to the vertiginous Reflection with Two Children (Self-portrait) (1965) and the raw, granular full-length nude Painter Working, Reflection (1992-1993), Freud’s self-portraits are formally daring and vary widely in style, marking pivotal moments in his life and work. ‘They form an arc of self-scrutiny in youth, middle age, final years,’ writes Jackie Wullschläger, ‘unfolding, like Rembrandt’s self-depictions, a decade-by-decade personal journey and also the evolution of an endlessly inventive, enthralling painterly manner’ (J. Wullschläger, ‘Lucian Freud: The Self-portraits—enthralling glimpse into a life on canvas’, Financial Times, 18 October 2019). Self-portrait Fragment is emblematic of Freud’s mid-1950s period, which saw him arrive at the intricate, richly worked technique that would become increasingly pronounced over the following decades.
Since the mid-1940s Freud’s paintings had been defined by a graphic exactitude and heightened attention to detail. He would often sit knee-to-knee with his subjects, the painting held in his lap. By the time he painted Self-portrait Fragment, he had begun instead to stand at an easel, and had substituted his fine sable brushes for coarser hog’s-hair. His gaze remained sharp: ‘Sometimes when I’ve been staring too hard’, he told William Feaver, ‘I’ve noticed that I could see the circumference of my own eye’ (L. Freud quoted in W. Feaver, ‘Lucian Freud: Life into Art’, in Lucian Freud, exh. cat. Tate, London 2002, p. 26). Yet the pictures gained a new vitality as their polish gave way to surfaces of nuanced, varied colour, every feature carrying the brushstroke’s charge. In his introduction to Freud’s catalogue raisonné, Toby Treves locates this turning point in the present work. ‘We might imagine that, as he painted Self-portrait Fragment, the shock of the discovery so frightened him that he stopped work on the picture, as if he had heard the sound of breathing come from the figure emerging on the canvas’ (T. Treves, ‘An Introduction’, in C. Lampert and T. Treves, Lucian Freud: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, London 2025, vol. 1, p. 17).
In Freud’s centenary exhibition at the National Gallery, Self-portrait Fragment was hung alongside the contemporaneous unfinished portrait Francis Bacon (1956-1957). The pairing emphasised the impact of Freud’s relationship with Bacon. The two had been friends since the mid-1940s and saw each other almost daily during these years, carousing in Soho, discussing their work and visiting one another’s studios. Freud was living on Dean Street at the time, but also kept his studio in Delamere Terrace in Paddington, where he painted both of these pictures. He was impressed by Bacon’s daring and wit, and by his attitude to paint. It was Bacon who inspired him to loosen the tight control of his early work. ‘He talked a great deal about the paint itself carrying the form,’ Freud remembered, ‘and imbuing the paint with this sort of life; he talked about packing a lot of things into a single brushstroke’ (L. Freud quoted in W. Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth, 1922-68, London 2019, pp. 487-488).
The arrival of Freud’s more freely modelled and expressive approach is palpable in both paintings, with the men’s faces blooming into life amid the amplifying space of the blank canvas. In Self-portrait Fragment each shadow, furrow and gleam—the curve of his aquiline nose, the sparkle of his grey-blue eyes rimmed with white—is at once precisely captured and animated by the brushwork’s texture. Licks of paint indicate flame-like locks of hair. In the lines that sketch the unfinished areas, Freud’s early talent as a draughtsman lingers. With his painting hand pressed to his cheekbone, he records a moment of contact, as if in awe at the union of paint and flesh. Echoing Caroline Blackwood’s pose in the double portrait Hotel Bedroom (1953-1954)—begun on the couple’s honeymoon in Paris—it is perhaps also a gesture of farewell. Freud painted his final portrait of Caroline, Girl by the Sea, in 1956.
Fragmentary works became increasingly frequent in Freud’s oeuvre during the 1950s and would recur throughout his career. Recent years have seen mounting recognition of their importance. The fact that he kept and exhibited these paintings, notes Treves, ‘indicates that Freud saw a unique quality in them, probably to do with that mysterious moment in which life enters a work’ (T. Treves in C. Lampert and T. Treves, ibid., vol. 2, p. 200). They can be seen in the context of the non finito tradition exemplified by the deliberately incomplete sculptures of Michelangelo and Auguste Rodin, who was his favourite sculptor. ‘Nearly all Freud’s figurative paintings’, writes Catherine Lampert, ‘… echo to some degree the corporeal and embraceable qualities of sculpture’ (C. Lampert, ‘Sculpture: A First and Last Love’, in ibid., vol. 1, p. 43). His own unfinished works offer insights into a distinctive working process. The contrast between the present painting’s areas of emptiness and fine finish is typical. Rather than building up an entire picture in layers, Freud would work outwards from the subject’s eyes or another focal point, completing each detail as he went.
The 2025 publication of the catalogue raisonné of Freud’s oil paintings reminds us of the richness and number of self-portraits as a body of work. ‘Fragments’ comprise almost a third of the examples recorded. A similarly partial quality can be found even in the finished self-portraits, many of which present an image that is cropped or obscured: the artist appears among a pot-plant’s leaves, as a slivered profile peering from behind a wall, and as a dark reflection in a hand-mirror. The difficulty of seeing oneself fully is a rich theme in the genre’s history. Rembrandt’s self-portraits vary widely across four decades, becoming playful costume dramas, advertisements of skill or visions of sombre introspection. Joseph Koerner compares Freud’s work to Albrecht Dürer’s unfinished nude self-portrait of circa 1506, in which ‘incompletion testifies to the unique condition of self-portraiture: artists are least visible to themselves. Glimpsed only as a reflection, and mobile when a model should sit still, the artist pursues himself as an elusive stranger’ (J. L. Koerner, ‘The Presence of the Past’, in Lucian Freud: The Self-Portraits, exh. cat. Royal Academy of Arts, London 2019, p. 22).
Freud worked from a mirror for his self-portraits. Speaking to Jake Auerbach, he explained that the process was ‘completely different’ to painting another person. ‘I do start more self-portraits and destroy more than any other pictures because in my case they seem to go wrong so very, very often’, he said. ‘… You can’t see yourself like you can other people.’ Part of the challenge was to approach himself with the same clear-eyed scrutiny that he turned upon his sitters. ‘I try to avoid any expression on my part which seems to me to be viewing oneself in a pleasant or conciliatory light. I notice from self-portraits very often that people tend to give themselves a kind of grandeur—which I’m not saying they haven’t got, but which they certainly don’t give to other people’ (L. Freud in conversation with J. Auerbach, Omnibus, series 25, episode 3, BBC, aired 20 May 1988). Self-portrait Fragment reveals its own grandeur as Freud probes the mysteries of paint, flesh and self.