Lucian Freud was one of the major figurative painters of the 20th century. Working in an uncompromisingly confrontational style, his portraits and nudes were rendered with a thickly laden brush. Often painting himself, as well as family and friends his works are imbued with a distinctive psychological space. Painted under intense direct observation, usually over the course of many sittings, Freud observed of his practice: “The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes and, ironically, the more real.” Born on December 8, 1922 in Berlin, Germany he was the grandson of the famed psychologist Sigmund Freud. In 1933, he moved with his family to London to escape the persecution of Jews by the Nazi regime. He went...