Lucian Freud (1922–2011), born in Berlin and later residing in England, was a renowned British painter celebrated for his figurative style and penetrating portraits. Fleeing Nazi Germany with his family in 1933, Freud studied art in London, where he developed a distinctive technique marked by thick paint layers and intense scrutiny of the human form. His portraits, often of friends, family, and lovers, were characterized by their raw honesty and psychological depth, capturing the vulnerability and complexity of his subjects. Notable works include “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping,” which fetched a record price for a living artist’s work at auction. Freud’s confrontational approach to portraiture stirred controversy but solidified his reputation as one of the most important figurative painters of the 20th century. He received accolades such as the Order of Merit from Queen Elizabeth II. Freud’s legacy endures through his vast body of work, which continues to influence contemporary art with its technical mastery and exploration of human psychology.

Lucian Freud Quotes

1. “I have a timetable, but no routine.”
— Lucian Freud

2. “The task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable.”
— Lucian Freud

3. “The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.”
— Lucian Freud

4. “What do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.”
— Lucian Freud

5. “Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait.”
— Lucian Freud

6. “The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh.”
— Lucian Freud

7. “The painter must give a completely free rein to any feeling or sensations he may have and reject nothing to which he is naturally drawn.”
— Lucian Freud

8. “I could never put anything into a picture that wasn’t actually there in front of me. That would be a pointless lie, a mere bit of artfulness.”
— Lucian Freud

9. “When I’m painting people in clothes I’m always thinking very much of naked people, or animals dressed.”
— Lucian Freud

10. “It is the only point of getting up every morning: to paint, to make something good, to make something even better than before, not to give up, to compete, to be ambitious.”
— Lucian Freud

11. “The paintings that really excite me have an erotic element or side to them irrespective of subject matter.”
— Lucian Freud

12. “The only way I could work properly was by using the absolute maximum of observation and concentration that I could possible muster.”
— Lucian Freud

13. “I have a hatred of habit and routine. And what dogs love is just that. They like regular everything, and I don’t have regular anything. I have a timetable, but no routine.”
— Lucian Freud

14. “Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid.”
— Lucian Freud

15. “I’ve always wanted to create drama in my pictures, which is why I paint people. It’s people who have brought drama to pictures from the beginning. The simplest human gestures tell stories.”
— Lucian Freud

16. “I paint people, not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be.”
— Lucian Freud

17. “The character of the artist doesn’t enter into the nature of the art.”
— Lucian Freud

18. “I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them.”
— Lucian Freud

19. “The painter makes real to others his innermost feelings about all that he cares for. A secret becomes known to everyone who views the picture through the intensity with which it is felt.”
— Lucian Freud

20. “I work from the people that interest me, and that I care about, in rooms that I live in and know. I use the people to invent my pictures, and I can work more freely when they are there.”
— Lucian Freud

21. “An artist should appear in his work no more than God in nature. The man is nothing; the work is everything.”
— Lucian Freud

22. “There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so.”
— Lucian Freud

23. “As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does.”
— Lucian Freud

24. “The process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than is the picture. The process in fact is habit-forming.”
— Lucian Freud

25. “I remember Francis Bacon would say that he felt he was giving art what he thought it previously lacked. With me, it’s what Yeats called the fascination with what’s difficult. I’m only trying to do what I can’t do.”
— Lucian Freud

26. “When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won’t. There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so.”
— Lucian Freud

27. “I use the gallery as if it were a doctor. I come for ideas and help – to look at situations within painting, rather than paintings.”
— Lucian Freud

28. “The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement.”
— Lucian Freud

29. “The painter’s obsession with his subject is all that he needs to drive him to work.”
— Lucian Freud

30. “I am only interested in painting the actual person, in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong.”
— Lucian Freud

31. “A painter’s tastes must grow out of what so obsesses him in life that he never has to ask himself what it is suitable for him to do in art.”
— Lucian Freud

32. “Losing as much money as I can get hold of is an instant solution to my economic problems.”
— Lucian Freud

33. “A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure.”
— Lucian Freud

34. “If all the qualities which a painter took from the model for his picture were really taken, no person could be painted twice.”
— Lucian Freud

35. “And, since the model he faithfully copies is not going to be hung up next to the picture, since the picture is going to be there on its own, it is of no interest whether it is an accurate copy of the model.”
— Lucian Freud

36. “The only secret I can claim to have is concentration, and that’s something that can’t be taught.”
— Lucian Freud

37. “When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won’t.”
— Lucian Freud

38. “Sometimes, when I’ve been staring too hard, I’ve noticed that I could see the circumference of my own eye.”
— Lucian Freud

39. “Painting is sometimes like those recipes where you do all manner of elaborate things to a duck, and then end up putting it on one side and only using the skin.”
— Lucian Freud

40. “The paintings live because their creator has been passionately attentive to their theme, and his attention has left something for us to look at. It seems a sort of miracle.”
— Lucian Freud