An exhibition about Lucian Freud, an artist famous for his paintings, is generally not about his paintings, except when it is.
The National Portrait Gallery, which holds the Lucian Freud archive, has rummaged through it and put on a display of his less well-known sketches, seeking to show that the artist was more than just an oil painter but also a skilled draughtsman.
I have to start by confessing a heresy – I am not that keen on the artist’s work.
He’s rightly lauded as one of the UK’s greatest modern portrait artists, and I can stand back and admire the skill in the paintings. I just find them plain bloody ugly. Not ugly because they are raw and uncompromising, as I quite admire that, but often they seem almost caricatures of ugliness, as if he wanted to exaggerate rather than represent the fragility of human existence.
His sketches show how it started, with a curious obsession with exaggerated foreheads and lips.
Lots of sketches of friends, and some selfies, all exaggerating and looking distinctly as if everyone is suffering from variants of Habsburg Jaw.
It must be a quirk, as the handful of sketches of plants on display are picture portraits of what you expect from a botanical sketch. But he turns to humans, and ugh!
Although the gallery notes that some of the works on display are from private collections and are rarely seen, the exhibition can almost feel familiar. There are famous paintings dotted around the rooms, and if you’ve been to any of the seemingly endless Lucian Freud exhibitions in recent years, you’ve probably seen some of this exhibition already.
That’s probably the weakness in the exhibition, that for all the talk about a rare chance to see the sketches, they’ve somewhat padded it out with a lot of not-sketches. As it happens, the paintings are far more interesting to look at, so I am glad they are there, but they weren’t really necessary for a show that ostensibly isn’t about paintings.
Had the exhibition been just sketches, it’d have been half the size, but probably better for it. Understandable, as people do tend to prefer bigger shows, and hitting the “at least 100 objects” mark is now a minimum that’s expected of big museums and galleries.
A nice touch in the exhibition though is the paint and palette that he left in a locker at the National Gallery, expecting to return for them, but never did. They were kept and later handed to the family, and I found that one small display case was more human than any of the paintings surrounding me.
The exhibition, Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting, is at the National Portrait Gallery until 4th May 2026.
- Standard Ticket: £23
- Concession: £20.70
- National Art Pass: £11.50
- 12-25: £5
- Under 5: Free
Details and tickets here.
A peculiarity is that the exhibition has a sign stating that making videos in the gallery is fine, but still photography should be kept to a minimum.
I hope that is a one-off, as the thought of being stuck behind a video maker while they spend ages doing multiple passes instead of snapping a photo and stepping back to let other people see it is ghastly.
