Lucian Freud

(British, 1922-2011)

Boy and animals in a landscape 26.4 x 32.3 cm. (10 3/8 x 12 5/8 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
Erica Brausen, 1960s, by whom gifted to the family of the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

"In those early years, between adolescence and his late twenties, Freud drew like a man possessed. His manner and his subjects through these years underwent various transformations, each one magically particular". (Sebastian Smee in Lucian Freud on Paper, Jonathan Cape, London, 2008, p.5)

Born in Berlin, and a grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, the young Lucian fled with his family to England in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism. They settled in London where Freud lived for the rest of his life. His artistic training was minimal but he studied variously at Goldsmith's College, the Central School of Art and, most successfully, at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing under Cedric Morris. He then served as a merchant seaman in an Atlantic Convoy in 1941 before being invalided out of the service the following year and as a result of his poor physical condition was able to avoid conscription.

Freud's early work is dominated by studies of animals, plants, objects and landscape. And although he would turn away from it in the 1950s, drawing, rather than painting, was then his preferred medium. "The earliest of them, made in the 1930s and 1940s, when Freud was in his teens, tell of a slow imaginative expansion, marked by a kind of wild unpredictability. As Freud hit his stride in his twenties, his drawing underwent a process of contraction and concentration, conferring on his best pictures an almost electrical charge of objective intensity". (Loc.Cit.) The present work is constructed in warm ochre layers of watercolour and gouache together with pen and ink making it as much a painting as a drawing and the muted shades of brown, orange and yellow punctuated by highlights of red and green, are all extensively treated with Freud's signature line drawing. Created circa 1942, when he was just twenty years old, and in stark contrast to the global conflict raging around him, Boy and animals in a landscape depicts a bucolic English (possibly Midlands) vista with a boy resting against a tree, surrounded by plant and wild life. The typically nameless boy sits in profile, poised, with hands lying gently on his legs and stares thoughtfully into space, miles away from the horrors of war. Today Freud is celebrated as one of the twentieth century's greatest painters of the human form, but in the present work the boy and supporting figure (centre left) are just that – supporting figures – to the abundant flora and fauna that encircles them. There is a very real sense of what William Feaver has aptly described as "dormant animation", all is still... but look closer and life abounds. Here, the composition is teeming with creatures, small and large, imagined and real. Some of these, such as the whippet-like dog and fantastical bird next to the dogs hind leg, would recur in later work. Also present are a rabbit, a cat, a horse, two cows and a vole-like creature. Each is fully described with unique character and the artists well established wit. Freud once said "If you look at Chardin's animals, they're absolute portraits. It's to do with the individuality and the intensity of the regard and the focus on the specific' (the artist quoted in Sebastian Smee, 'A Late-Night Conversation with Lucian Freud,' in Freud at Work, New York, 2006, p.33). Here, a cow pokes its head into the picture plane inquisitively, the vole glances back at the scampering rabbit, a flattened cat appears startled by the boy with a bag slung over his shoulder and the horse almost grins as it chomps down in the far pasture. But of equal importance to the mammals, is the plant life. Trees, flowers and grass are all rendered in exquisite detail and once more, motifs such as a tulip-like bloom and spikey holly/thorns would reappear in later work, both on paper and canvas. It is precisely this hyper-specific focus that makes Freud's early works so unforgettable, and his direct observation of nature so crucial a part of his artistic development.

It has been written that in Freud's formative years, he demonstrated in only a short span, the discovery of "most of the themes that would later pre-occupy him: the endlessly intriguing faces of people he knows well; the vitality, even personality, of animals and plants; figures and objects viewed frontally and at close range". (Richard Calvocovessi, Ed., Exhibition Catalogue, Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Lucian Freud: Early Works, 1997, p.10) This statement is certainly true of the present, previously unrecorded, work which represents a veritable anthology of the artist's formative interests and is an exciting rediscovery across Lucian Freud's corpus of remarkable early works on paper. Previously in the collection of Erica Brausen, founder of the Hanover Gallery and a champion of Francis Bacon, Boy and animals in a landscape offers collectors a unique opportunity to acquire an incredible showcase of the artist's early practice.

We are grateful to David Dawson, Catherine Lampert and Toby Treves for their assistance in cataloguing this lot.