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Lot Essay
‘… the difference between Paris and London is the difference between life and death’ (Lucian Freud, 1946)
Made in Paris in 1946, The Birds of Olivier Larronde is a visionary early painting by Lucian Freud. With the graphic polish typical of his work of the time, Freud depicts a pair of colourful lovebirds in a gleaming red cage. The cage seems to be suspended in the air, and its elaborate, improbable structure lends the picture a surreal quality. One bird meets our gaze with narrowed eyes, while the other peers out mischievously below. The work captures a moment of intense creative inspiration for Freud, who plunged into the exotic, vibrant cultural life of Paris after the end of the Second World War. He painted the birds while staying in the hotel room of the young poet Olivier Larronde, a protegé of Jean Genet and Jean Cocteau. The picture was purchased soon afterwards by Freud’s friend Graham Sutherland, and was latterly owned by the leading British collector Simon Sainsbury. It has been widely exhibited during its lifetime, including in Freud’s joint exhibition with John Craxton in 1947, his touring Arts Council retrospective of 1974 and his 1988 survey at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh.
‘I was always longing to go to Paris,’ Freud said (L. Freud quoted in D. Dawson & M. Gayford (eds.), Love Lucian: The Letters of Lucian Freud 1939-1954, London 2022, p. 223). Travel during the war years had been difficult, and the twenty-three-year-old artist dreamed of escape from the oppressive atmosphere of England. His friend Craxton had arrived in Paris early in 1946, and wrote excitedly of its wonders. With help from his patron Peter Watson, Freud made it over the Channel in May. The city was even more thrilling than he had imagined. At the bohemian restaurant Le Catalan, he encountered artists from Pablo Picasso to Alberto Giacometti, Alexander Calder, Balthus and André Breton. He went dancing, dined at the home of his grandfather’s friend Princess Marie Bonaparte, strolled the Seine and marvelled at the circuses. ‘The light here is wonderful and brilliant and subtle’, he wrote in July to Craxton, who by then had moved on to Greece: ‘the difference between Paris and London is the difference between life and death’ (ibid., p. 244).
Freud and Larronde were introduced by Watson, who had already brought their illustrations and poetry together in the pages of his magazine Horizon. When Larronde and his partner Jean-Pierre Lacloche left Paris, Freud moved from his nearby lodgings into their room at the Hôtel d’Isly to care for their birds and other pets, including a fierce Alsatian. Writing to Craxton, he recounted his progress with the present work, adding a small drawing of the composition: ‘Jean Pierre is in Italy and Olivier in the country and I am living in their big corner room at the minute working on a painting of the Little parrots in the Kage and a portrait of Robert la Marle [sic]’ (ibid., p. 244). The commissioned Portrait of Robert Le Masle is the only other surviving painting Freud made during this time. It remains in Paris today in the collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou.
Freud returned briefly to London before following Craxton to Greece in August 1946. It was at this point—perhaps to help finance his travels—that he sold the present work to his friend Graham Sutherland. Among the foremost British artists of the day, Sutherland was also responsible for initiating Freud’s formative friendship with Francis Bacon. He later lent the painting for Freud’s joint exhibition with Craxton at the London Gallery in 1947, which, wrote the poet Geoffrey Grigson, emitted ‘An electric poetry. I feel an electricity and poetry coming out of Lucien [sic] Freud’s portraits of women, small pictures of a sprig of lemon tree with a lemon, or his painting of coloured birds in a cage, The Birds of Olivier Larronde, which belongs to Graham Sutherland’ (G. Grigson, ‘Who Paints Now in England?’, Harper’s Bazaar, vol. 40, no. 2, November 1948, p. 77).
The Birds of Olivier Larronde combines its stylised, dreamlike edge with keenly concentrated detail in a manner distinct to Freud’s early paintings. He appears captivated by the cage’s complex beams and decorative cornicing, which he studied in preparatory sketches, including features which he elided from the finished work. He also made drawings of the birds in different poses. In the painting, their finely-observed plumage identifies the species as the yellow-collared lovebird, Agapornis personatus. While Freud had drawn and painted animals in England, they had always been imagined or deceased specimens: monkeys from Palmer’s Pet Stores in Camden, a taxidermied zebra head, a fictive puffin on a Scillonian beach. Here, in bright colours and with a vivid sense of character, the birds come unmistakably to life.
Made in Paris in 1946, The Birds of Olivier Larronde is a visionary early painting by Lucian Freud. With the graphic polish typical of his work of the time, Freud depicts a pair of colourful lovebirds in a gleaming red cage. The cage seems to be suspended in the air, and its elaborate, improbable structure lends the picture a surreal quality. One bird meets our gaze with narrowed eyes, while the other peers out mischievously below. The work captures a moment of intense creative inspiration for Freud, who plunged into the exotic, vibrant cultural life of Paris after the end of the Second World War. He painted the birds while staying in the hotel room of the young poet Olivier Larronde, a protegé of Jean Genet and Jean Cocteau. The picture was purchased soon afterwards by Freud’s friend Graham Sutherland, and was latterly owned by the leading British collector Simon Sainsbury. It has been widely exhibited during its lifetime, including in Freud’s joint exhibition with John Craxton in 1947, his touring Arts Council retrospective of 1974 and his 1988 survey at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh.
‘I was always longing to go to Paris,’ Freud said (L. Freud quoted in D. Dawson & M. Gayford (eds.), Love Lucian: The Letters of Lucian Freud 1939-1954, London 2022, p. 223). Travel during the war years had been difficult, and the twenty-three-year-old artist dreamed of escape from the oppressive atmosphere of England. His friend Craxton had arrived in Paris early in 1946, and wrote excitedly of its wonders. With help from his patron Peter Watson, Freud made it over the Channel in May. The city was even more thrilling than he had imagined. At the bohemian restaurant Le Catalan, he encountered artists from Pablo Picasso to Alberto Giacometti, Alexander Calder, Balthus and André Breton. He went dancing, dined at the home of his grandfather’s friend Princess Marie Bonaparte, strolled the Seine and marvelled at the circuses. ‘The light here is wonderful and brilliant and subtle’, he wrote in July to Craxton, who by then had moved on to Greece: ‘the difference between Paris and London is the difference between life and death’ (ibid., p. 244).
Freud and Larronde were introduced by Watson, who had already brought their illustrations and poetry together in the pages of his magazine Horizon. When Larronde and his partner Jean-Pierre Lacloche left Paris, Freud moved from his nearby lodgings into their room at the Hôtel d’Isly to care for their birds and other pets, including a fierce Alsatian. Writing to Craxton, he recounted his progress with the present work, adding a small drawing of the composition: ‘Jean Pierre is in Italy and Olivier in the country and I am living in their big corner room at the minute working on a painting of the Little parrots in the Kage and a portrait of Robert la Marle [sic]’ (ibid., p. 244). The commissioned Portrait of Robert Le Masle is the only other surviving painting Freud made during this time. It remains in Paris today in the collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou.
Freud returned briefly to London before following Craxton to Greece in August 1946. It was at this point—perhaps to help finance his travels—that he sold the present work to his friend Graham Sutherland. Among the foremost British artists of the day, Sutherland was also responsible for initiating Freud’s formative friendship with Francis Bacon. He later lent the painting for Freud’s joint exhibition with Craxton at the London Gallery in 1947, which, wrote the poet Geoffrey Grigson, emitted ‘An electric poetry. I feel an electricity and poetry coming out of Lucien [sic] Freud’s portraits of women, small pictures of a sprig of lemon tree with a lemon, or his painting of coloured birds in a cage, The Birds of Olivier Larronde, which belongs to Graham Sutherland’ (G. Grigson, ‘Who Paints Now in England?’, Harper’s Bazaar, vol. 40, no. 2, November 1948, p. 77).
The Birds of Olivier Larronde combines its stylised, dreamlike edge with keenly concentrated detail in a manner distinct to Freud’s early paintings. He appears captivated by the cage’s complex beams and decorative cornicing, which he studied in preparatory sketches, including features which he elided from the finished work. He also made drawings of the birds in different poses. In the painting, their finely-observed plumage identifies the species as the yellow-collared lovebird, Agapornis personatus. While Freud had drawn and painted animals in England, they had always been imagined or deceased specimens: monkeys from Palmer’s Pet Stores in Camden, a taxidermied zebra head, a fictive puffin on a Scillonian beach. Here, in bright colours and with a vivid sense of character, the birds come unmistakably to life.