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Lot Essay
“It’s not like anything [Freud’s] done before. It’s very much a picture of how he feels and is—a picture of being 82.” - William Feaver
Ambitious, playful, and conceptually complex, The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer is an extraordinary late masterpiece by Lucian Freud. The artist depicts himself standing as he paints, seemingly interrupted by the nude young woman at his feet. She clasps his thigh, eyes closed as if in reverie. The painting itself can be seen, partly finished, on an easel. The tall chair before it is piled high with brushes. A vertiginous sweep of floorboards drives the view into the picture: behind the figures we see the paint-encrusted surface of Freud’s studio wall, a shrouded radiator, and banks of the white rags he used to wipe his brushes. The work is a remarkable essay on the relationships between artist and muse, painter and painting and—by extension—between art and life. It was unveiled for three weeks at the National Portrait Gallery in London soon after its completion in 2005, before travelling to Freud’s major retrospective exhibition at the Museo Correr, Venice. Subsequently shown at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in Lucian Freud: L’Atelier in 2010, it has not been seen in public since.
Freud, who would turn eighty-two as he completed the painting, conceived of it as “rather a spectacular picture” (L. Freud quoted in W. Feaver, “Freud at the Correr: Fifty Years,” in Lucian Freud, exh. cat. Museo Correr, Venice, 2005, p. 32). The idea was bold. Working with his sitter, Alexandra Williams-Wynn, he would paint from their reflection in a full-length mirror, making his studio a greater part of the picture than ever before. He would intertwine its self-referential play with an inquiry into his status as a masterful, aging artist. At the same time he would invoke humorous echoes of works by some of his own artistic inspirations, including Titian, Courbet, and Ingres. Requiring great effort and endurance, even by Freud’s standards—their pose meant disengaging from his partner each time he stepped over to the easel to paint—the finished canvas was a landmark achievement. The poet and critic Kelly Grovier described it as a “genre-busting masterpiece… Part self-portrait, part nude, and part infinite regression of paintings within paintings” (K. Grovier, “Naked Truths,” The Guardian, November 6, 2005).
A major figure in British art for half a century, by the time he painted the present work Freud was an artist of international renown. The tight miniaturist control of his early painting had evolved—thanks in part to the influence of his friend Francis Bacon—into the visceral, impasto-charged scrutiny for which he is best known today. “As far as I’m concerned the paint is the person,” he once said. “I want it to work for me just as flesh does” (quoted in L. Gowing, Lucian Freud, London, 1982, p. 191). Self-portraits punctuate his oeuvre. From the surreal, vertiginous Reflection with Two Children (Self-portrait) (1965, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid) to the full-length nude Painter Working, Reflection (1993), which exemplifies his granular late style, these formally daring works often mark turning points in his practice. “You’ve got to try to paint yourself as another person,” he said. “Looking in the mirror is a strain in a way that looking at other people isn’t at all” (quoted in W. Feaver, Lucian Freud, New York, 2007, p. 31). In The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer, Freud brought his work into still more self-conscious and theatrical territory, staging a dreamlike vision of the studio where paint, flesh, art, and life were—like himself and his muse—intricately entangled.
Alexandra Williams-Wynn, an artist and the daughter of a Welsh baronet, met Freud in 2004 while she was studying at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. “The speed with which I entered his life and began sitting was, I think, very characteristic of him—highly impulsive, urgent, impatient towards anything beyond his life in the studio,” she recalled. “… I quickly found myself sitting seven days a week, night and day. This lasted a year… We were lovers, so the situation seemed quite normal in a heightened, exhilarating kind of way… being with Lucian made me realize that this is no joke: being an artist, being alive” (A. Williams-Wynn quoted in D. Kamp, “Freud, Interrupted,” Vanity Fair, January 16, 2012). Freud’s assistant David Dawson took photographs as the painting progressed. Several were featured in the 2006 volume Freud at Work; one, with the pair reproducing their pose in front of the canvas, was used as the front cover for the American edition of Dawson’s monograph A Painter’s Progress: A Portrait of Lucian Freud (2014).
“One senses in the present painting and in others made subsequently, Freud’s increasing self-awareness that he is regarded as an ‘old man’ with diminishing powers.” - Catherine Lampert
In the painting, the mutual creative thrill between artist and sitter is palpable. So, too, is an ambiguous power dynamic. Williams-Wynn, fifty years Freud’s junior, might be seen as a supplicant, muse or impediment as she clings to his leg. Deliberately provocative, the image is also self-deprecating. The title Freud chose, notes Catherine Lampert, “reflects in part the constant tabloid interest in his private life, and the contrast between his age and fame and those of the young women in his life… One senses in the present painting and in others made subsequently, Freud’s increasing self-awareness that he is regarded as an ‘old man’ with diminishing powers” (C. Lampert and T. Treves, Lucian Freud: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, London 2025, vol. 4, p. 282). The artist was not without a sense of humor. “I’ve thought, looking at paintings I like, that they’ve nearly always got a joke in them, of sorts,” he said. “… I thought that painting was very badly in need of something to stop it being a sort of ‘Silent Artist at Work’, you know?” (quoted in S. Smee, “A Late-Night Conversation with Lucian Freud,” in Freud at Work, New York, 2006, p. 13).
The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer conjures a range of art-historical precedents. One is Gustave Courbet’s monumental The Studio of the Painter (1855, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), in which the artist, a Creator at the center of his world, is watched over by figures including a female nude. William Feaver notes echoes of the Diana and Actaeon myth—the hunter transformed and killed for intruding on the goddess and her nymphs—as portrayed in two of Freud’s favorite paintings by Titian. The duo’s pose also evokes Ingres’ Jupiter and Thetis (1811, Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence) and, more closely still, his Raphael and the Fornarina (1814, Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA). The latter depicts the Renaissance artist Raphael focused on his famous painting of his beloved ‘Fornarina,’ while the woman herself sits in his lap. In Freud’s scene, the painter appears distracted by his sitter’s physical presence, and his hand holds no brush or palette knife. But we know, in the end, that the painting on the easel was completed: art, for him, always triumphs over life.
Freud’s first major homage to an older painting was the masterpiece Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau) (1981-1983), which restaged Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Pierrot Content (circa 1712, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid) with a crowd of sitters, including lovers and offspring. In After Cézanne (1999-2000, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra), Freud transformed a light-hearted Post-Impressionist painting into a grittier scene, with Freddy, one of his sons, brooding in the company of two women. As with these works, The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer was assembled as a tableau vivant with living sitters in Freud’s studio. It departs from them, however, in the tight focus of its two-hander composition. Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau) involved a proliferation of preparatory drawings for its multiple figures, while After Cézanne required the grafting-on of a section of canvas, creating a strangely irregular final shape. The present work—finetuned as Freud painted—arrives instead at a poised, enigmatic harmony worthy of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656, Museo del Prado, Madrid).
This would be the final painting Freud completed in the top-floor workspace at his home in Holland Park in London, whose stairs had become arduous in his old age. The setting is as alive as its inhabitants. The chair, seen at a perspective slightly at odds with the room, becomes a looming anthropomorphic presence. The piled-up rags and paint-daubed wall make Freud’s process palpable. Freud’s thick, tactile marks replicate the actual surface of the clotted wall, just as in Self-portrait, Reflection (2002)—where they swarmed above his head—they merged with the texture of painted skin. “They are the stuff of ideas, hopes, effort and setback,” writes William Feaver (W. Feaver, ibid., p. 32). While resolutely real rather than symbolic, such elements take on a metaphysical quality, present in Freud’s work since the surreal early picture The Painter’s Room (1944). Paintings nest within paintings; the work itself both creates and is created by the contained universe of the studio.
“It’s always a stimulating thought,” Freud said of the present work, “that this might be the last picture.” It was not to be: he continued to work until his death, aged eighty-eight, in 2011. In its inspired conception, thematic richness and wry self-scrutiny, however, The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer stands as a climax among the paintings of his final decade. Freud’s greatest works had always been animated by a tension between exposure and mystery. More than their frank depictions of the human body, it is their sense of truly trying to see a person—of reaching across the space between self and other, and sounding out the complex and unknown—that gives them their startling, intimate power. In the present painting Freud gives new form to this attention, arriving at a self-portrait, hall of mirrors and play-within-a-play that even, it seems, surprised the painter himself. “It’s got a funny feeling; it looks as if were done long ago,” he said. “Not the idiom: it’s to do with the distance and things. It’s like doing it on another planet” (L. Freud quoted in W. Feaver, ibid., p. 33).
Ambitious, playful, and conceptually complex, The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer is an extraordinary late masterpiece by Lucian Freud. The artist depicts himself standing as he paints, seemingly interrupted by the nude young woman at his feet. She clasps his thigh, eyes closed as if in reverie. The painting itself can be seen, partly finished, on an easel. The tall chair before it is piled high with brushes. A vertiginous sweep of floorboards drives the view into the picture: behind the figures we see the paint-encrusted surface of Freud’s studio wall, a shrouded radiator, and banks of the white rags he used to wipe his brushes. The work is a remarkable essay on the relationships between artist and muse, painter and painting and—by extension—between art and life. It was unveiled for three weeks at the National Portrait Gallery in London soon after its completion in 2005, before travelling to Freud’s major retrospective exhibition at the Museo Correr, Venice. Subsequently shown at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in Lucian Freud: L’Atelier in 2010, it has not been seen in public since.
Freud, who would turn eighty-two as he completed the painting, conceived of it as “rather a spectacular picture” (L. Freud quoted in W. Feaver, “Freud at the Correr: Fifty Years,” in Lucian Freud, exh. cat. Museo Correr, Venice, 2005, p. 32). The idea was bold. Working with his sitter, Alexandra Williams-Wynn, he would paint from their reflection in a full-length mirror, making his studio a greater part of the picture than ever before. He would intertwine its self-referential play with an inquiry into his status as a masterful, aging artist. At the same time he would invoke humorous echoes of works by some of his own artistic inspirations, including Titian, Courbet, and Ingres. Requiring great effort and endurance, even by Freud’s standards—their pose meant disengaging from his partner each time he stepped over to the easel to paint—the finished canvas was a landmark achievement. The poet and critic Kelly Grovier described it as a “genre-busting masterpiece… Part self-portrait, part nude, and part infinite regression of paintings within paintings” (K. Grovier, “Naked Truths,” The Guardian, November 6, 2005).
A major figure in British art for half a century, by the time he painted the present work Freud was an artist of international renown. The tight miniaturist control of his early painting had evolved—thanks in part to the influence of his friend Francis Bacon—into the visceral, impasto-charged scrutiny for which he is best known today. “As far as I’m concerned the paint is the person,” he once said. “I want it to work for me just as flesh does” (quoted in L. Gowing, Lucian Freud, London, 1982, p. 191). Self-portraits punctuate his oeuvre. From the surreal, vertiginous Reflection with Two Children (Self-portrait) (1965, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid) to the full-length nude Painter Working, Reflection (1993), which exemplifies his granular late style, these formally daring works often mark turning points in his practice. “You’ve got to try to paint yourself as another person,” he said. “Looking in the mirror is a strain in a way that looking at other people isn’t at all” (quoted in W. Feaver, Lucian Freud, New York, 2007, p. 31). In The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer, Freud brought his work into still more self-conscious and theatrical territory, staging a dreamlike vision of the studio where paint, flesh, art, and life were—like himself and his muse—intricately entangled.
Alexandra Williams-Wynn, an artist and the daughter of a Welsh baronet, met Freud in 2004 while she was studying at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. “The speed with which I entered his life and began sitting was, I think, very characteristic of him—highly impulsive, urgent, impatient towards anything beyond his life in the studio,” she recalled. “… I quickly found myself sitting seven days a week, night and day. This lasted a year… We were lovers, so the situation seemed quite normal in a heightened, exhilarating kind of way… being with Lucian made me realize that this is no joke: being an artist, being alive” (A. Williams-Wynn quoted in D. Kamp, “Freud, Interrupted,” Vanity Fair, January 16, 2012). Freud’s assistant David Dawson took photographs as the painting progressed. Several were featured in the 2006 volume Freud at Work; one, with the pair reproducing their pose in front of the canvas, was used as the front cover for the American edition of Dawson’s monograph A Painter’s Progress: A Portrait of Lucian Freud (2014).
“One senses in the present painting and in others made subsequently, Freud’s increasing self-awareness that he is regarded as an ‘old man’ with diminishing powers.” - Catherine Lampert
In the painting, the mutual creative thrill between artist and sitter is palpable. So, too, is an ambiguous power dynamic. Williams-Wynn, fifty years Freud’s junior, might be seen as a supplicant, muse or impediment as she clings to his leg. Deliberately provocative, the image is also self-deprecating. The title Freud chose, notes Catherine Lampert, “reflects in part the constant tabloid interest in his private life, and the contrast between his age and fame and those of the young women in his life… One senses in the present painting and in others made subsequently, Freud’s increasing self-awareness that he is regarded as an ‘old man’ with diminishing powers” (C. Lampert and T. Treves, Lucian Freud: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, London 2025, vol. 4, p. 282). The artist was not without a sense of humor. “I’ve thought, looking at paintings I like, that they’ve nearly always got a joke in them, of sorts,” he said. “… I thought that painting was very badly in need of something to stop it being a sort of ‘Silent Artist at Work’, you know?” (quoted in S. Smee, “A Late-Night Conversation with Lucian Freud,” in Freud at Work, New York, 2006, p. 13).
The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer conjures a range of art-historical precedents. One is Gustave Courbet’s monumental The Studio of the Painter (1855, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), in which the artist, a Creator at the center of his world, is watched over by figures including a female nude. William Feaver notes echoes of the Diana and Actaeon myth—the hunter transformed and killed for intruding on the goddess and her nymphs—as portrayed in two of Freud’s favorite paintings by Titian. The duo’s pose also evokes Ingres’ Jupiter and Thetis (1811, Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence) and, more closely still, his Raphael and the Fornarina (1814, Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA). The latter depicts the Renaissance artist Raphael focused on his famous painting of his beloved ‘Fornarina,’ while the woman herself sits in his lap. In Freud’s scene, the painter appears distracted by his sitter’s physical presence, and his hand holds no brush or palette knife. But we know, in the end, that the painting on the easel was completed: art, for him, always triumphs over life.
Freud’s first major homage to an older painting was the masterpiece Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau) (1981-1983), which restaged Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Pierrot Content (circa 1712, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid) with a crowd of sitters, including lovers and offspring. In After Cézanne (1999-2000, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra), Freud transformed a light-hearted Post-Impressionist painting into a grittier scene, with Freddy, one of his sons, brooding in the company of two women. As with these works, The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer was assembled as a tableau vivant with living sitters in Freud’s studio. It departs from them, however, in the tight focus of its two-hander composition. Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau) involved a proliferation of preparatory drawings for its multiple figures, while After Cézanne required the grafting-on of a section of canvas, creating a strangely irregular final shape. The present work—finetuned as Freud painted—arrives instead at a poised, enigmatic harmony worthy of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656, Museo del Prado, Madrid).
This would be the final painting Freud completed in the top-floor workspace at his home in Holland Park in London, whose stairs had become arduous in his old age. The setting is as alive as its inhabitants. The chair, seen at a perspective slightly at odds with the room, becomes a looming anthropomorphic presence. The piled-up rags and paint-daubed wall make Freud’s process palpable. Freud’s thick, tactile marks replicate the actual surface of the clotted wall, just as in Self-portrait, Reflection (2002)—where they swarmed above his head—they merged with the texture of painted skin. “They are the stuff of ideas, hopes, effort and setback,” writes William Feaver (W. Feaver, ibid., p. 32). While resolutely real rather than symbolic, such elements take on a metaphysical quality, present in Freud’s work since the surreal early picture The Painter’s Room (1944). Paintings nest within paintings; the work itself both creates and is created by the contained universe of the studio.
“It’s always a stimulating thought,” Freud said of the present work, “that this might be the last picture.” It was not to be: he continued to work until his death, aged eighty-eight, in 2011. In its inspired conception, thematic richness and wry self-scrutiny, however, The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer stands as a climax among the paintings of his final decade. Freud’s greatest works had always been animated by a tension between exposure and mystery. More than their frank depictions of the human body, it is their sense of truly trying to see a person—of reaching across the space between self and other, and sounding out the complex and unknown—that gives them their startling, intimate power. In the present painting Freud gives new form to this attention, arriving at a self-portrait, hall of mirrors and play-within-a-play that even, it seems, surprised the painter himself. “It’s got a funny feeling; it looks as if were done long ago,” he said. “Not the idiom: it’s to do with the distance and things. It’s like doing it on another planet” (L. Freud quoted in W. Feaver, ibid., p. 33).