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Lot Essay
‘She was the first person who meant something to me’ (Lucian Freud)
Painted at Delamere Terrace, the canal-side studio in the somewhat seedy part of Paddington to which Lucian Freud moved in 1942, Woman with a Tulip was shown in the artist’s first solo show at the Lefevre Gallery in 1944 alongside the now celebrated Self Portrait (Man with a Feather) (1943) and The Painter’s Room (1944). Small enough to be held in the palm of one hand, its jewel-box colour and emotional intensity exert themselves even across the full length of a room. In 1946, Woman with a Tulip was shown again at the gallery in a group exhibition of works by artists including Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon and John Craxton. The critic Maurice Collis singled out the painting for its extraordinary power: ‘a tiny portrait by Lucian Freud, the youngest of the young men here, shows remarkable skill. He may turn out the most gifted’ (M. Collis, ‘Art: Lucian Freud’, The Observer, 10 February 1946).
Freud’s pictures from the Lefevre exhibition were dominated by subjects from the natural world, hard-lined and exacting, their settings sometimes verging on the surreal. Their clarity was born of a heightened, almost hallucinatory focus, every detail individual and specific: the fur of a rabbit, a thistle’s crystalline spikes, the patterned shell of a lobster. Woman with a Tulip was originally titled and exhibited as Lorna. The sitter is Lorna Wishart, and the work is the first of only two portraits painted of the woman who, by Freud’s own admission, was ‘the first person who meant something to me’ (L. Freud quoted in L. Gowing, Lucian Freud, London 1982, p. 29). It has since been widely exhibited, including in Freud’s Arts Council survey of 1974, the landmark Tate retrospective of 2002-2003, and, most recently, in the 2022-2023 centenary exhibition Lucian Freud: New Perspectives at the National Gallery, London and the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.
Lorna was one of nine Garman siblings, a family who ‘lived at the centre of European literary and political life between the two World Wars and numbered some of the greatest artists and writers among their husbands, friends and lovers’ (C. Connolly, The Rare and the Beautiful: The Lives of the Garmans, London 2004, p. xiii). The youngest and by several accounts the loveliest of the seven sisters, she seduced and married the wealthy publisher and communist Ernest Wishart at the age of sixteen and at the time of her first encounter with Freud was having a passionate affair with the writer Laurie Lee.
Lorna and Freud were introduced in 1942, when he was nineteen. As the critic Lawrence Gowing later wrote of him, ‘People who met Freud in his middle teens, and a lot of people did, recognised his force immediately; fly, perceptive, lithe, with a hint of menace … I met him first in the winter of 1938-39 when he was fifteen or sixteen and already spoken of as a boy-wonder’ (L. Gowing, ibid., p. 9). Lorna was thirty-one. Wild and unconventional, her beauty mesmerised men and women alike. ‘The great thing about Lorna is she had these amazing eyes’, said Pauline Tennant, who three years later was to replace her in the artist’s affections. ‘They were profoundly blue. When she looked at you, you felt transfixed. She was remarkably beautiful’ (P. Tennant quoted in C. Connolly, ibid., p. 151). Her ability to seduce went beyond the physical. The words most frequently associated with her were magical and hypnotic. She had the power to alter the course of lives.
Lorna’s impact on Freud’s work was immediate. In Self-portrait (Man with a Feather) (1943), the white chicken feather which he pointedly grips between left thumb and forefinger was a token from her and anticipates the use of the emblematic tulip in the present work. It was Lorna, too, who procured for him, from a taxidermist in Piccadilly, the stuffed zebra head seen in The Painter’s Room (1944), and the bird—found in a marsh near her Sussex home—depicted in the poignant Dead Heron (1945). Freud painted few portraits in the early 1940s, instead drawn to plant and animal forms often painted on small plywood panels. Materials were scarce during the war years, but Freud obtained manufacturers’ samples sent to his architect father, Ernst Freud, which he scoured smooth before priming the surface with gesso.
In Woman with a Tulip the connection between artist and sitter is electric. His scrutiny seems to match hers. He is hypnotised by those large, dark blue eyes. He pays rapt attention to the sensuous form of her lips and the tulip’s curving petals. It was not only Lorna’s beauty but a magnetic attraction and shared sensibility which drew them together, the basis of which was well understood by the painter John Craxton. ‘He was déraciné, he wasn’t bound by conventions. He was very free. And so was she. Lorna was the most wonderful company, frightfully amusing and ravishingly good-looking: she could turn you to stone with a look. And she had deep qualities; she was not fluttery, she wasn’t facile at all. She had a kind of mystery, a mystical inner quality’ (J. Craxton quoted in C. Connolly, ibid., p. 174).
Woman with a Tulip foreshadows major works of the later 1940s such as Girl with a Kitten (1947) and Girl with Roses (1947-1948), which depict Lorna’s niece—and Freud’s first wife—Kitty Garman. By that time Freud was painting with a more sculptural approach, still exquisitely precise but less centred on draughtsmanship. Woman with a Tulip shares with these later portraits what Freud called an ‘involuntary magnification’ as he concentrated on features that fascinated him. Sanda Miller has observed that they ‘are iconic rather than physiognomic. They have still and calm expressions and, often, large and staring eyes. The format is as simple as it is effective; we find the same kind of iconicity in the Coptic portraits of Al-Faiyum, in the sixth-century Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna’s San Vitale church and elsewhere in Byzantine art, in 15th-century Flemish and Venetian painting, and of course in Modigliani’ (S. Miller, ‘People by Lucian Freud’, Artforum, vol. 26, no. 2, October 1987, p. 115). Freud himself disavowed all influences, claiming to be guided only by his utter fascination with the subject.
The provenance of Woman with a Tulip reflects the intertwined nature of Freud’s circle and the earliest supporters of his work. Its first buyer was Ian Gibson-Smith, who had photographed a studio portrait of Freud the previous year posing with his prized zebra head. Lorna herself purchased The Painter’s Room, the largest of the works shown at the Lefevre Gallery. By the time Freud painted these works, however, the couple were already under strain. He made just one other painting of Lorna, Woman with a Daffodil (1945), which was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1953.
Writing thirty years on in 1974, John Russell reflected that Woman with a Tulip seemed to stand apart from its era, evoking instead the work of Renaissance miniaturists. ‘Only the dimension of disquiet—the broody, unresolved, divided look—was peculiar to our age’, he wrote (J. Russell, ‘Introduction’, in Lucian Freud, exh. cat. Arts Council of Great Britain, London 1974, p. 13). This ‘disquiet’ has been seen to characterise many of Freud’s 1940s and early-1950s portraits, capturing the existential unease of the time. Others have read Woman with a Tulip differently. Andrew Wilson, who described both of Lorna’s portraits as ‘emblems of emotional intensity’, wrote that ‘the true love of a tulip coincides with Wishart looking out full face, open eyes full of hope’ (A. Wilson, ‘Lucian Freud’, in The Simon Sainsbury Bequest: To Tate and the National Gallery, exh. cat. Tate, London 2008, pp. 108-109).
In its enigmatic integration of life and art, its emotional complexity and its ability to signal an all-consuming involvement with another person, Woman with a Tulip prefigures preoccupations that would define Freud’s work for decades. This extraordinary portrait leaves a reminder of a woman who altered not only the course of Freud’s painting but also that of his emotional life. She had a profound effect on his psyche. Years later Craxton remembered Freud’s own words: ‘He said to me—I’ve never forgotten—“I am never, ever going to love a woman more than she loves me” … She was a muse, a true muse in the best possible way’ (J. Craxton quoted in C. Connolly, ibid., p. 181).
Painted at Delamere Terrace, the canal-side studio in the somewhat seedy part of Paddington to which Lucian Freud moved in 1942, Woman with a Tulip was shown in the artist’s first solo show at the Lefevre Gallery in 1944 alongside the now celebrated Self Portrait (Man with a Feather) (1943) and The Painter’s Room (1944). Small enough to be held in the palm of one hand, its jewel-box colour and emotional intensity exert themselves even across the full length of a room. In 1946, Woman with a Tulip was shown again at the gallery in a group exhibition of works by artists including Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon and John Craxton. The critic Maurice Collis singled out the painting for its extraordinary power: ‘a tiny portrait by Lucian Freud, the youngest of the young men here, shows remarkable skill. He may turn out the most gifted’ (M. Collis, ‘Art: Lucian Freud’, The Observer, 10 February 1946).
Freud’s pictures from the Lefevre exhibition were dominated by subjects from the natural world, hard-lined and exacting, their settings sometimes verging on the surreal. Their clarity was born of a heightened, almost hallucinatory focus, every detail individual and specific: the fur of a rabbit, a thistle’s crystalline spikes, the patterned shell of a lobster. Woman with a Tulip was originally titled and exhibited as Lorna. The sitter is Lorna Wishart, and the work is the first of only two portraits painted of the woman who, by Freud’s own admission, was ‘the first person who meant something to me’ (L. Freud quoted in L. Gowing, Lucian Freud, London 1982, p. 29). It has since been widely exhibited, including in Freud’s Arts Council survey of 1974, the landmark Tate retrospective of 2002-2003, and, most recently, in the 2022-2023 centenary exhibition Lucian Freud: New Perspectives at the National Gallery, London and the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.
Lorna was one of nine Garman siblings, a family who ‘lived at the centre of European literary and political life between the two World Wars and numbered some of the greatest artists and writers among their husbands, friends and lovers’ (C. Connolly, The Rare and the Beautiful: The Lives of the Garmans, London 2004, p. xiii). The youngest and by several accounts the loveliest of the seven sisters, she seduced and married the wealthy publisher and communist Ernest Wishart at the age of sixteen and at the time of her first encounter with Freud was having a passionate affair with the writer Laurie Lee.
Lorna and Freud were introduced in 1942, when he was nineteen. As the critic Lawrence Gowing later wrote of him, ‘People who met Freud in his middle teens, and a lot of people did, recognised his force immediately; fly, perceptive, lithe, with a hint of menace … I met him first in the winter of 1938-39 when he was fifteen or sixteen and already spoken of as a boy-wonder’ (L. Gowing, ibid., p. 9). Lorna was thirty-one. Wild and unconventional, her beauty mesmerised men and women alike. ‘The great thing about Lorna is she had these amazing eyes’, said Pauline Tennant, who three years later was to replace her in the artist’s affections. ‘They were profoundly blue. When she looked at you, you felt transfixed. She was remarkably beautiful’ (P. Tennant quoted in C. Connolly, ibid., p. 151). Her ability to seduce went beyond the physical. The words most frequently associated with her were magical and hypnotic. She had the power to alter the course of lives.
Lorna’s impact on Freud’s work was immediate. In Self-portrait (Man with a Feather) (1943), the white chicken feather which he pointedly grips between left thumb and forefinger was a token from her and anticipates the use of the emblematic tulip in the present work. It was Lorna, too, who procured for him, from a taxidermist in Piccadilly, the stuffed zebra head seen in The Painter’s Room (1944), and the bird—found in a marsh near her Sussex home—depicted in the poignant Dead Heron (1945). Freud painted few portraits in the early 1940s, instead drawn to plant and animal forms often painted on small plywood panels. Materials were scarce during the war years, but Freud obtained manufacturers’ samples sent to his architect father, Ernst Freud, which he scoured smooth before priming the surface with gesso.
In Woman with a Tulip the connection between artist and sitter is electric. His scrutiny seems to match hers. He is hypnotised by those large, dark blue eyes. He pays rapt attention to the sensuous form of her lips and the tulip’s curving petals. It was not only Lorna’s beauty but a magnetic attraction and shared sensibility which drew them together, the basis of which was well understood by the painter John Craxton. ‘He was déraciné, he wasn’t bound by conventions. He was very free. And so was she. Lorna was the most wonderful company, frightfully amusing and ravishingly good-looking: she could turn you to stone with a look. And she had deep qualities; she was not fluttery, she wasn’t facile at all. She had a kind of mystery, a mystical inner quality’ (J. Craxton quoted in C. Connolly, ibid., p. 174).
Woman with a Tulip foreshadows major works of the later 1940s such as Girl with a Kitten (1947) and Girl with Roses (1947-1948), which depict Lorna’s niece—and Freud’s first wife—Kitty Garman. By that time Freud was painting with a more sculptural approach, still exquisitely precise but less centred on draughtsmanship. Woman with a Tulip shares with these later portraits what Freud called an ‘involuntary magnification’ as he concentrated on features that fascinated him. Sanda Miller has observed that they ‘are iconic rather than physiognomic. They have still and calm expressions and, often, large and staring eyes. The format is as simple as it is effective; we find the same kind of iconicity in the Coptic portraits of Al-Faiyum, in the sixth-century Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna’s San Vitale church and elsewhere in Byzantine art, in 15th-century Flemish and Venetian painting, and of course in Modigliani’ (S. Miller, ‘People by Lucian Freud’, Artforum, vol. 26, no. 2, October 1987, p. 115). Freud himself disavowed all influences, claiming to be guided only by his utter fascination with the subject.
The provenance of Woman with a Tulip reflects the intertwined nature of Freud’s circle and the earliest supporters of his work. Its first buyer was Ian Gibson-Smith, who had photographed a studio portrait of Freud the previous year posing with his prized zebra head. Lorna herself purchased The Painter’s Room, the largest of the works shown at the Lefevre Gallery. By the time Freud painted these works, however, the couple were already under strain. He made just one other painting of Lorna, Woman with a Daffodil (1945), which was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1953.
Writing thirty years on in 1974, John Russell reflected that Woman with a Tulip seemed to stand apart from its era, evoking instead the work of Renaissance miniaturists. ‘Only the dimension of disquiet—the broody, unresolved, divided look—was peculiar to our age’, he wrote (J. Russell, ‘Introduction’, in Lucian Freud, exh. cat. Arts Council of Great Britain, London 1974, p. 13). This ‘disquiet’ has been seen to characterise many of Freud’s 1940s and early-1950s portraits, capturing the existential unease of the time. Others have read Woman with a Tulip differently. Andrew Wilson, who described both of Lorna’s portraits as ‘emblems of emotional intensity’, wrote that ‘the true love of a tulip coincides with Wishart looking out full face, open eyes full of hope’ (A. Wilson, ‘Lucian Freud’, in The Simon Sainsbury Bequest: To Tate and the National Gallery, exh. cat. Tate, London 2008, pp. 108-109).
In its enigmatic integration of life and art, its emotional complexity and its ability to signal an all-consuming involvement with another person, Woman with a Tulip prefigures preoccupations that would define Freud’s work for decades. This extraordinary portrait leaves a reminder of a woman who altered not only the course of Freud’s painting but also that of his emotional life. She had a profound effect on his psyche. Years later Craxton remembered Freud’s own words: ‘He said to me—I’ve never forgotten—“I am never, ever going to love a woman more than she loves me” … She was a muse, a true muse in the best possible way’ (J. Craxton quoted in C. Connolly, ibid., p. 181).