The evolution of Lucian Freud in eight artworks

According to the artist Celia Paul, it was partly the break-up of Lucian Freud’s marriage to the society beauty Caroline Blackwood that caused the drastic change in his technique. He stopped using a sable paintbrush, with which he had achieved a needle-sharp precision, in favour of layering paint using a rough, hog-hair brush.

At the time, the change was controversial. The art historian Kenneth Clark commented that Freud was deliberately suppressing what made his work remarkable. Freud, ever the risk-taker, dismissed such criticism. In heavy impasto he found a way to convey the feel of flesh, and over the next 60 years he devoted himself to exploring the subject.

In the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale and Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale on 5 and 7 March 2026, Christie’s will offer a group of works that chart this progression from crystalline precision to tactile physicality. In tandem with the landmark exhibition Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting at the National Portrait Gallery in London (until 4 May 2026), these works track the artist’s graphic and painterly evolution from the 1920s to the early 2000s.

Freud once said of his paintings that ‘everything is biographical and everything is a self-portrait’, and that certainly holds true in these works, which reveal the artist’s lifelong ambition to make paint hold the weight and presence of life, even after it has gone.

Untitled, circa 1939-40, and Zebra Head on a Chair, 1944

In the spring of 1939, the 16-year-old Freud enrolled at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Suffolk, which was run by the British artists Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines. Freud liked the school’s relaxed attitude and freewheeling Surrealism, echoed in the sketches he made there.

That summer, a woman named Lorna Wishart came to see Morris, and her glamour attracted attention. Freud recalled her as ‘wonderful looking’. She was, in many ways, a dream for an artist. Beautiful and capricious, with plucked eyebrows and a wide red mouth, she looked like a femme fatale. Peggy Guggenheim thought she was the most beautiful creature she had ever seen.

Freud met Wishart again in 1943, and the couple embarked on a passionate affair. At the time, Wishart was seeing the writer Laurie Lee, who immediately spotted a rival in Freud — that ‘dark, decayed-looking youth’. Wishart bought Freud a stuffed zebra’s head from a taxidermist in Piccadilly, and Freud installed it in the flat he shared in Paddington with his friend John Craxton. Over the next year, the zebra appeared as a surreal prop in a number of Freud’s paintings, most notably Quince on a Blue Table (1943-44) and The Painter’s Room (1944).

The Birds of Olivier Larronde, 1946

When restrictions on travel were lifted after the Second World War, Freud left London for Paris, eager to experience the city of liberation and see first-hand the paintings of Picasso and Braque. Roaming the streets like a paint-splattered Rimbaud, he quickly immersed himself in this capital of exiles, discovering a cast of characters as unconventional as an existentialist soap opera.

His first introduction to the city’s dissolute charm was the 18-year-old Olivier Larronde, a poet who lived in the Hôtel d’Isly with his lover, Jean-Pierre Lacloche. Theirs was a claustrophobic existence, surrounded by books, furniture and an exotic menagerie of pets that Freud — who had taken a room in the building — looked after when they were on holiday.

The Birds of Olivier Larronde depicts the poet’s much-loved parrots, painted as brightly and precisely as tin toys. It is one of the few works Freud completed during his stay in Paris — partly because of an impish writer called Léna Leclercq, who was so enamoured of Larronde that she stole Freud’s sketchbooks filled with drawings of the cherubic-looking poet.

Lemon, 1946-47

Freud arrived in Poros in the winter of 1946, after his friend John Craxton persuaded him to abandon the seedy magic of the French capital in favour of the tiny Greek island. The two artists found lodgings near a lemon grove, where Freud spent hours talking with local residents. What he particularly valued was the openness with which people responded to his artworks. ‘They looked at a drawing and believed in it and accepted it — not like the British,’ he said.

Craxton described Freud’s paintings from this period as among his most ‘limpid and luminous’. The island light, with its scorched shadows, instilled a metaphysical intensity in his work. The simplicity of Lemon is almost icon-like, aglow with a quiet, spiritual iridescence.

Bella, circa 1983, and Ib, 1990

Freud’s daughter Isobel Boyt first posed for the artist as a child, and continued to do so sporadically until his death in 2011. In the early years, she resented surrendering her weekends to sittings, recalling the discomfort and boredom. In time, however, she came to value those hours in the studio. ‘It’s a way of having a relationship with my dad — and there’s a part of me that is quite flattered,’ she later reflected.

The head portrait Ib, painted in 1990 when Isobel was 29, shows the thick impasto of Freud’s later style: her face appears almost weighed down by its own flesh.

Born in 1961 — the same year as Isobel — Bella Freud began sitting for her father after moving to London at 16. The eldest daughter of Freud’s lover Bernardine Coverley, she described herself then as a ‘wild and turbulent teenager’, while recalling her father as ‘strong and invincible’. Early sessions concentrated on her head and torso. In this drawing from 1983, when Bella was 22, she is shown with her arms raised — a pose that conveys both defiance and a flicker of vulnerability.

Pluto’s Grave, 2003

Pluto came into Freud’s life in 1988. The whippet was initially bought for his daughter Bella, but quickly became attached to the artist. Her calm, sleepy disposition made her a good sitter for his paintings and an easy companion to have around the studio, although she often got covered in oil paint.

When Bella began her fashion label in 1990, she asked Freud to design the logo, and he drew a portrait of Pluto which later featured on her clothes. Freud was attracted to the vitality of whippets. ‘What draws me to paint them is the life in them,’ he said. Pluto died in 2003, and this painting of her grave, along with this preparatory sketch, captures the artist’s deep affection for her.

Christie’s 20th/21st Century Art auctions take place in London and online, until 19 March 2026. Explore the preview exhibition and sales

Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting is at the National Portrait Gallery in London until 4 May 2026

Related artists: Lucian Freud