Seventy-one years since his first appearance in Vogue, and eight years after his death, we are once again in a season of Lucian Freud. Next month, the Royal Academy mounts an exhibition of his self-portraits, gathered in their entirety for the first time. Meanwhile, a brace of new books celebrate his life in photographs and paintings, from the large-scale Lucian Freud: A Life to volume one of The Lives of Lucian Freud, the long-awaited official biography by William Feaver.
Here, Vogue’s Clifford Coffin visits a 24-year-old Freud in his Paddington studio in March 1947, though the portrait would not be published until late the following year. The young painter wears a thick naval sweater, which, along with a pair of tartan trousers, was one of the few items of clothing he then possessed and a souvenir of his war service.
Although born in Berlin, he had come to England with his family in 1933 and, in a display of enthusiasm for his adopted homeland, enlisted in the Merchant Navy in 1941. It was short-lived and horrific. He made only one tour of duty, aboard the SS Baltrover to Nova Scotia, during which the ship was heavily strafed by gunfire. Freud was invalided out and returned to London, where he had formed a close friendship with another painter, John Craxton, two months his elder.
That March, the pair had just returned from a five-month-long trip to Greece. Glimpsed on Lucian’s easel is "Head of a Greek Man", which was painted by Freud during their stay. It shows Petros, a son of the family with whom he and Craxton lodged. There they lived frugally, with tangerine and lemon trees outside their rooms – a brightly hued, sun-drenched contrast to the gloom of post-war London.
“If you touch wild birds,” Freud once remarked, “it’s a marvellous feeling.” And here, perched on his gloved hand, is one of two sparrowhawks he owned in the late 1940s. He had traded a painting for a Wehrmacht-issue Luger pistol, which he used to shoot rats for his birds to eat. By the time Coffin’s portrait appeared, the sparrowhawk had flown. Lucian had released it into the Essex wilds where he had gone to stay with friends. It seemed so happy there, he said. Freud had been happy in the English countryside, too, spending his schooldays in Devon, and then Dorset, riding horses and painting – always painting.
