Lucian Freud - Early Career

Early Career

Freud briefly studied at the Central School of Art in London, and from 1939 with greater success at Cedric Morris' East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham, relocated in 1940 to Benton End, a house near Hadleigh, Suffolk. He also attended Goldsmiths College, part of the University of London, from 1942–3. He served as a merchant seaman in an Atlantic convoy in 1941 before being invalided out of service in 1942.

In 1943, Tambimuttu, the Sri Lankan editor, commissioned the young artist to illustrate a book of poems by Nicholas Moore entitled "The Glass Tower." It was published the following year by Editions Poetry London and comprised, among other drawings, a stuffed zebra and a palm tree. Both subjects reappeared in The Painter's Room on display at Freud's first solo exhibition in 1944 at the Alex Reid & Lefevre Gallery. In the summer of 1946, he travelled to Paris before continuing to Greece for several months to visit John Craxton. In the early fifties he was a frequent visitor to Dublin where he would share Patrick Swift's studio. In late 1952 Freud and Lady Caroline Blackwood eloped to Paris where they married in 1953. He otherwise lived and worked in London for the rest of his life.

Freud formed part of a group of figurative artists that the American artist, Ronald Kitaj, later named "The School of London". This was more a loose collection of individual artists who knew each other, some intimately, and were working in London at the same time in the figurative style (but during the boom years of abstract painting). The group was led by figures such as Francis Bacon and Freud, and included Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, Leon Kossoff, Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde, Reginald Gray, and Kitaj himself. He was a visiting tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art of University College London from 1949 to 1954.