![]() Family Album Lucian Freud's portrait of his daughter Ib and her husband is one of intimacy and familial insight Lucian Freud paints those with whom he is familiar, with whom he has relationships -- lovers, friends and family -- and this fills his pictures with their unique, heady atmosphere, their meaty existentialism, their searing insights into the lives and emotions of the subjects and the artist himself. As Freud himself has explained, 'If you don't know them, it can only be like a travel book' (Freud, quoted in L. Gowing, Lucian Freud, London, 1982, p. 56). His paintings feed on a sense of physical and emotional presence. The relationship is alive, and captured in thick oils before us, his painterly abandon resulting in a material manifestation, lending emotions an impastoed physicality. Intimacy and insight are clearly present in Ib and her Husband, painted in 1992, a portrait of Freud's daughter Isobel Boyt. She is shown in her husband's arms, sprawled on a grim bed in a paint-spattered corner of the studio. The couple appear to be asleep. The viewer is intruding upon a scene of the utmost privacy. Looking down from above, the viewer is placed in Ib's father's shoes, conferring upon us a strange perspective as we are brought into the family group. While the couple appear restful and content, there is nonetheless a mysterious tension to the painting. Three, after all, is a crowd-there is some voyeuristic and proprietary aspect that adds a dimension of mild discomfort, making Ib and her Husband all the more unconventional and fascinating. The rigours and strain of sitting for Freud - as well as the benefits that outweigh them - have been hinted at by Ib herself: 'Each time I did a picture with him I swore I'd never do it again, but I then do because it is a way of having a relationship with my dad' (quoted in R. Brooks,'Naked portrait of life as daughter of Lucian Freud', The Sunday Times, 21 March 2004). Freud gives his all to his paintings, and despite the emotional intensity that sometimes accompanies sitting with him for members of his immediate family, their presence in the inner sanctum of the artist, the spoiling attentions that he often lavishes upon his subjects and the chance to be with him all provide ample compensation. It is for this reason that members of his family are repeatedly subjects in his paintings - Ib has featured in a large number of her father's paintings over the past four decades. She was already shown as a child in Large Interior, Paddington, painted in 1968-69, where she was shown lying on the floor by a plant. Close-up views that give a sense of intense proximity have also featured, as well as a later oil showing her while she is reading. Freud has painted many members of his family, including Ib's daughters - indeed, the fact that Alice, her second daughter, was born around the time that Ib and her Husband was painted perhaps adds a new context to both the possessive perspective of the painter, and the protective hold of the husband on the bed, making this all the more personal a glimpse into the world of Freud himself. Article provided by Christie's Post-War & Contemporary Art Department, New York. |