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拍品专文
Executed in 1943, Boy on a Balcony is an exquisite early work on paper by Lucian Freud. Intricately rendered in graphite, coloured pencil and crayon, it depicts his friend Nigel Macdonald, seated against the railings of a balcony. Crisp lines trace the contours of his features, the folds of his clothes and the sweep of his hair. Delicate passages of shading and flashes of white capture the play of light and shadow across his form. The work captures the dazzling precision and clarity that defined Freud’s early graphic language. His drawings played a vital role in his work of this period, fuelling his first waves of critical acclaim and nourishing the hawk-eyed rigour that would come to define his art over the following decades. Gifted by the artist to the present owner circa 1971, the present work has been prominently exhibited, featuring in Freud’s major retrospectives at the Hayward Gallery in 1974 and Tate Britain in 2002, as well as his critically-acclaimed exhibition Drawing into Painting at the National Portrait Gallery earlier this year.
In 1943, the twenty-one-year-old Freud was living in London, following the completion of his studies at Cedric Morris’ East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing. He was dating Lorna Wishart, who gifted him the famous stuffed zebra head that featured in several important works during his period. Freud shared a maisonette at Abercorn Place in St John’s Wood with fellow artist John Craxton, before moving to Delamere Terrace in Paddington sometime between 1943 and 1944. Macdonald was one of a number of young men who appeared in the artist’s portraits during these years, sitting for Tired Boy (1943) as well as the present work. His brother, Ian, also sat for the exquisite Boy with Pigeon (1944). Macdonald’s girlfriend was the artist Betty Shaw-Lawrence, and in the summer of 1943 the couple travelled to Scotland with Freud, boarding the overnight train to Inverness and staying at the Drumnadrochit Hotel near Loch Ness. Freud, conspicuously clad in tartan trews, sketched Macdonald several times during their stay, as well as producing the seminal ink drawing Loch Ness from Drumnadrochit (1943).
Freud drew obsessively as a child, and the medium remained a central preoccupation for him well into his twenties. The artist had emigrated from Germany with his family at the age of ten. With a limited grasp of English, drawing became a way of communicating, peppering his letters and filling sketchbook after sketchbook. In 1944, he featured in the group exhibition New Paintings and Drawings at the Lefevre Gallery in London, where his drawings were particularly well received: the artist John Piper hailed his ‘cultivated feeling for line’ and his ‘natural feeling for colour’ (quoted in W. Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth 1922-1968, London, 2019, p. 195). His drawings also formed a key strand of his first solo exhibition at Lefevre later that year, which—according to Bruce Bernard—established Freud ‘as the figure he would continue to be—entirely singular, intriguing and provocative’ (Lucian Freud, London, 1996, p. 11). Among this body of work were seminal works on paper, including piercing early self-portraits and the exquisite Rabbit on a Chair (1944). Boy on a Balcony takes its place within these ranks, its surface alive with Freud’s razor-sharp draughtsmanship.
In 1943, the twenty-one-year-old Freud was living in London, following the completion of his studies at Cedric Morris’ East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing. He was dating Lorna Wishart, who gifted him the famous stuffed zebra head that featured in several important works during his period. Freud shared a maisonette at Abercorn Place in St John’s Wood with fellow artist John Craxton, before moving to Delamere Terrace in Paddington sometime between 1943 and 1944. Macdonald was one of a number of young men who appeared in the artist’s portraits during these years, sitting for Tired Boy (1943) as well as the present work. His brother, Ian, also sat for the exquisite Boy with Pigeon (1944). Macdonald’s girlfriend was the artist Betty Shaw-Lawrence, and in the summer of 1943 the couple travelled to Scotland with Freud, boarding the overnight train to Inverness and staying at the Drumnadrochit Hotel near Loch Ness. Freud, conspicuously clad in tartan trews, sketched Macdonald several times during their stay, as well as producing the seminal ink drawing Loch Ness from Drumnadrochit (1943).
Freud drew obsessively as a child, and the medium remained a central preoccupation for him well into his twenties. The artist had emigrated from Germany with his family at the age of ten. With a limited grasp of English, drawing became a way of communicating, peppering his letters and filling sketchbook after sketchbook. In 1944, he featured in the group exhibition New Paintings and Drawings at the Lefevre Gallery in London, where his drawings were particularly well received: the artist John Piper hailed his ‘cultivated feeling for line’ and his ‘natural feeling for colour’ (quoted in W. Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth 1922-1968, London, 2019, p. 195). His drawings also formed a key strand of his first solo exhibition at Lefevre later that year, which—according to Bruce Bernard—established Freud ‘as the figure he would continue to be—entirely singular, intriguing and provocative’ (Lucian Freud, London, 1996, p. 11). Among this body of work were seminal works on paper, including piercing early self-portraits and the exquisite Rabbit on a Chair (1944). Boy on a Balcony takes its place within these ranks, its surface alive with Freud’s razor-sharp draughtsmanship.