Lucian Freud, Reflection (Self-Portrait), 1985 · © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images · educational reference

Lucian Freud

1922–2011 · England

Researched by Daniel Bilmes, painter and educator.

Freud painted standing, from a live sitter posed within arm's reach, in marathon sittings that ran to hundreds of hours per canvas. He began with a charcoal drawing on the white canvas, blocked in the masses thinly with sparing turpentine, then built the flesh in thick layers of Cremnitz lead white using stiff hog-bristle brushes, pure tube oil with no medium after the block-in. He worked one painting at a time, refused all photographic reference, and reserved the face for the final third of the painting's life.

ProcessLayered TemperamentObserver LineageContemporary

Signature moves

Cremnitz white as the structural foundation

Built every flesh passage on a foundation of Cremnitz white — a dense, slow-drying lead carbonate manufactured to a 19th-century specification — long after the pigment had been abandoned by most contemporaries for toxicity.

Why it matters · A pigment is not a substitute for another pigment. Cremnitz white has a body and a refractive index that titanium cannot reproduce. Freud kept it because the flesh he wanted to paint required exactly that material. Painters who substitute on convenience produce the wrong painting.

William Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud (Vol. II), 2020

Painted standing, sitter at arm's reach

Worked standing at the easel, with the sitter posed close enough that he could touch the surface he was painting. Eye level matched the sitter's eye level for the entire session.

Why it matters · Distance to the subject is a methodological choice, not an accident. Freud's arm's-reach setup is the structural opposite of Sargent's twelve-foot retreat — both are committed positions about how flesh is to be observed. The middle distance is the one that produces nothing.

One painting at a time, hundreds of hours

Refused parallel commissions. Worked on a single canvas across months and sometimes years, with the sitter present for every session. The painting of David Hockney took 120 hours over four months.

Why it matters · A face does not yield to short attention. The hundredth hour shows you the sitter's attention has dropped its first masks. Freud's discipline was to keep the sitter in the room until that happened. Painters who finish a portrait in a week paint the masks.

David Hockney interview, 2002 — On sitting for Freud — 120 hours over four months.

Charcoal first, paint forward from the drawing

Began every painting with a charcoal drawing of the head or figure on the raw canvas — sometimes worked on the drawing for several sessions before the first paint went down.

Why it matters · The drawing is the painting's structure. Painters who skip directly to color have no skeleton; the paint floats. Freud's charcoal stage was load-bearing. The drawing was the painting before any paint touched it.

William Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud (Vol. II), 2020

Refused to paint anyone he did not know

Worked only from sitters with whom he had a personal relationship — children, lovers, friends, neighbors. Turned down major commissions when the sitter was a stranger.

Why it matters · Observation requires intimacy that a photograph cannot supply and that a stranger will not yield. Freud's refusal of commission portraiture was a methodological position about what observation actually requires. Painters who paint strangers paint surfaces.

William Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud (Vol. I), 2019

Wipe the brush after nearly every stroke

Wiped the brush on a rag after nearly every stroke, so no mixture drifted into the next one. The rag piles grew on the studio floor until they entered the paintings themselves, appearing as subject matter from the late 1980s on.

Why it matters · A brush that carries the last stroke into the next one averages the painting toward mud. Wiping after every stroke makes each note a separate decision, which is why Freud's flesh reads as built from distinct touches rather than blended. The cost is speed; the payment is that nothing on the canvas is accidental.

Martin Gayford, Man with a Blue Scarf; Tate exhibition literature, 2010

Studio

Light: North-facing skylight, Holland Park studio, London. Bare bulb at night when sittings ran past dark.
Position: Standing at the easel, the sitter posed within arm's reach. Eye level matched to the sitter's.
Working distance: Close — within touching distance of the canvas and the sitter both. The opposite of the academic retreat.
Session length: Two to four hours per sitting; sometimes longer. The same sitter required for every session over months.
Tools: Hog-bristle brushes (long-handled, stiff, square-ended) · Charcoal sticks for the underdrawing · Palette knife for scraping back when a passage failed · Single bare bulb for night work
Notes: The studio was famously filthy — paint-smeared walls, stained rags piled on chairs, the sitter's couch sometimes worked into the painting itself as ground. The mess was deliberate; he refused to clean it.

Source: William Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud (Vol. II), 2020 — Feaver was Freud's authorized biographer and a frequent studio visitor across decades.

Palette

Ground: Stretched canvas, prepared white. No tinted ground; the white was visible through thin early layers.
Whites: Cremnitz white (his signature material — lead carbonate, dense, slow-drying) · Flake white when Cremnitz unavailable
Earths: Yellow ochre · Raw umber · Burnt sienna · Terre verte
Colors: Cadmium red · Cadmium yellow · Cobalt blue · Ultramarine
Blacks: Ivory black
Medium: Pure tube oil. Sparing turpentine for the earliest thin block-in only — no medium thereafter. Layers built up wet-into-wet within a session and dry-over-dry across weeks.
Quantity: Generous palette. Refreshed each session. Cremnitz white set out in particular abundance — the late portraits used pounds of it per painting.

Source: William Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud, 2020 — Vol. II includes detailed material accounting from late-career works.

Workflow, from blank canvas

1. Charcoal drawing on raw canvas
Drew the head or figure directly on the white canvas in charcoal. Worked on this drawing across multiple sessions before any paint went down.
Why: The structure is established here. Skipping the drawing produces a painting without a skeleton.
2. Thin block-in with sparing turpentine
Laid in the masses with thin paint and a small amount of turpentine — establishing tonal architecture before color decisions.
Why: Value before color. The block-in is the painting's key; everything after sits in this register.
3. Build the impasto session by session
Layered Cremnitz-white-loaded paint in increasingly thick passages, working wet-into-wet within each session and letting weeks pass between layers.
Why: Flesh is built, not described. The thickness records the hours of observation; thin paint cannot hold that record.
4. Reserve the face for last
Painted the body, the hands, the surroundings before resolving the face. The face emerged in the final third of the painting's lifespan.
Why: A face painted first locks in a reading the rest of the painting then has to accommodate. Freud reversed the order — let the body inform what the face is.
5. Stop when the sitter has been seen
Ended the painting when the cumulative observation had resolved into something specific — not when every inch was finished to the same level.
Why: A portrait is finished when its observation has been completed, not when its surface has been polished. Resolving everything equally produces a death mask.

Refusals — what they would not do

Refused all photographic reference, including for environment and clothing.
Refused commission portraits where the sitter was a stranger.
Refused medium other than sparing turpentine for the block-in.
Refused to paint multiple canvases in parallel — one painting at a time.
Refused to clean the studio — the dirt and stains were part of the working environment.

Reference

Primary source: Live sitter, posed within arm's reach in the studio across hundreds of hours per painting.
Photography: Refused photography. Considered it incapable of supplying the observation he needed.

Exceptions

Animal paintings — horses, whippets — were painted from life when possible, but accepted brief reference photographs when the animal would not hold a pose.

Lineage

Every teacher and student below sits on the site-wide teacher-student map.

Teachers

Cedric Morris · 1939 — Briefly studied at Morris's East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing. Morris's loose figurative practice was rejected; the lesson Freud took was the discipline of working from life and the refusal of academic prescription.
Goldsmiths College and the Central School · 1942–1943 — Brief formal training. Freud was largely self-directed; institutional training shaped him through what he refused, not what he absorbed.

Influences

Albrecht Dürer — the Northern realist tradition of unsparing portraiture; the silver-point and linear discipline that informs Freud's charcoal stage.
Frans Hals and Rembrandt — the wet-into-wet alla prima of the Dutch Golden Age, observed and translated into a slower lifelong sustained-observation practice.
Francis Bacon — close friend in the 1950s; the conversation between their two practices shaped both.

Students

Did not teach formally. The "School of London" — Auerbach, Kossoff, Andrews, Kitaj — was a peer group with whom Freud worked in close conversation rather than a teacher-student lineage.

In their own words

“I want paint to work as flesh.”

— Lucian Freud, Recorded interview, quoted by William Feaver

“I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them.”

— Lucian Freud, Some Thoughts on Painting, Encounter magazine, 1954

“My work is purely autobiographical. It is about myself and my surroundings.”

— Lucian Freud, Recorded interview, quoted by William Feaver

Techniques and practices

cremnitz-white-impasto

hog-bristle-brush

marathon-sitting

standing-painting-practice

No-Medium Direct Oil

Painting in pure oil color straight from the tube, without linseed, turpentine, or glaze medium—a refusal of the thin-layered academic approach.

charcoal-underdrawing

private-sitter

What white paint did Lucian Freud use?

Cremnitz white, a dense, slow-drying lead carbonate manufactured to a 19th-century specification, with flake white as the fallback when Cremnitz was unavailable. He kept it long after most contemporaries abandoned it for toxicity, because the flesh he wanted required its body and refractive index. The late portraits used pounds of it per painting.

Did Freud paint from photographs?

No. He refused all photographic reference, including for environment and clothing, and worked only from the live sitter posed within arm's reach. The one exception was animals: horses and whippets were painted from life when possible, but he accepted brief reference photographs when the animal would not hold a pose.

How did Freud start a painting?

With a charcoal drawing of the head or figure directly on the white canvas, sometimes worked across several sessions before any paint went down. Then he laid in the masses thinly with sparing turpentine to establish the tonal architecture. The drawing carried the structure; everything after sat in that register.

What medium did Freud use?

Pure tube oil. He allowed sparing turpentine for the earliest thin block-in only, with no medium thereafter. Layers were built wet-into-wet within a session and dry-over-dry across weeks.

How long did a Freud portrait take?

Months and sometimes years, with the same sitter present for every session. Sittings ran two to four hours, sometimes longer, and he refused to work on more than one canvas at a time. The portrait of David Hockney took 120 hours over four months.

Who taught Lucian Freud, and did he teach?

He studied briefly with Cedric Morris at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in 1939, then passed through Goldsmiths College and the Central School in 1942 to 1943; he was largely self-directed, shaped more by what he refused than what he absorbed. He did not teach formally. The School of London painters (Auerbach, Kossoff, Andrews, Kitaj) were a peer group, not students.

If this painter is your match

You share Freud's instinct that observation requires an intimacy and a duration that most painters refuse to commit to — and the discipline to stay with one painting until the sitter has actually been seen.

Borrow this: For your next portrait, set a calendar for at least eight sittings of two hours each with the same person. Refuse all photographic reference. Begin with charcoal alone for the entire first session. Do not pick up a brush until the second.

Adjacent painters

Lawrence Alma-Tadema1836–1912

A Dutch-born Victorian archaeologist-painter who built a private library of five thousand annotated photographs of Roman ruins, reconstructed Pompeiian interiors as full studio sets, and brought every square inch of every canvas to the same degree of forensic resolution.

Andrew Wyeth1917–2009

A Brandywine painter who inherited N.C. Wyeth's narrative training but abandoned illustration for egg tempera on gessoed panel, worked the same Pennsylvania farms and Maine houses for seventy years, and built each picture through thousands of cross-hatched tempera strokes over weeks or months.

Artemisia Gentileschi1593–1654

A Baroque painter who ran her own workshops, set the dark brown ground to do the shadow work, and refused to send a drawing before the contract was signed.

William Blake1757–1827

An English Romantic visionary who refused both oil paint and live models, drew the figures he saw in empty chairs as if they were sitting there, and built his own wooden press because the commercial trade was a fetter to genius.

Shared the workbench

Other researched painters who used at least one of Freud’s techniques.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio1571–1610

A painter who blacked out every window but one, refused preparatory drawing entirely, and built each canvas back to front, painting foreground figures over backgrounds that were still wet.

Carolus-Duran1837–1917

A bravura portrait painter who threw out academic underdrawing, taught his students to attack the canvas with a loaded brush in the first sitting, and built a face from flat tones of matched value set side by side like a mosaic.

Frans Hals1582–1666

A Haarlem master who "drew with the brush" — no preparatory drawings on paper, wet-into-wet handling of unblended daubs, and a paint surface so visibly made that contemporaries said his portraits "seemed to live and breathe."

Winslow Homer1836–1910

A Boston-bred Civil War correspondent who built a studio on a storm-raked point in Maine, followed a seasonal migration, Maine in spring and autumn, the Adirondacks in summer, the tropics in winter, and painted watercolors by blotting and scraping paint off the paper rather than laying gouache white on top.

Oskar Kokoschka1886–1980

A Vienna Expressionist who called his portraits "psychological" — painted fast and direct, with fingers and brush butt as often as the brush, each sitter required to talk and move so the painting could catch the inner rhythm rather than the surface likeness.

J.C. Leyendecker1874–1951

A Saturday Evening Post and Arrow Collar illustrator whose cross-hatched chisel-stroke oil method produced 322 cover paintings and defined the graphic look of American advertising between 1905 and 1940 — a technical system built at the Académie Julian and refined over four decades in the New Rochelle studio.

Primary sources

William Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud, Volumes I & II, 2019. Authorized biography by a frequent studio visitor across decades. The principal source for working practice, sitter relationships, and material choices.
Lucian Freud, Some Thoughts on Painting, Encounter magazine, 1954. Freud's only published statement of artistic position — short, terse, and the source of several of the canonical quotes.
Sebastian Smee, Lucian Freud: 1996–2005, 2005. Catalogue and essay covering the late impasto period.

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