__ a drawing __

by Lucian Freud (1922–2011) (1947)
— Freud made this drawing as one of his illustrations for a book written by Princess Marie Bonaparte of Greece and Denmark. She and her husband, Prince George, were friends of the artist’s family whom Freud got to know when he began to stay in Paris for lengthy periods after the war. She had been a patient and disciple of Lucian’s grandfather Sigmund, and helped him greatly when he wanted to flee Vienna for exile in London. Both Marie and George were, Lucian recalled, “absolutely out of touch with ordinary life”. When she discussed the fee for the illustrations with Freud, she had no sense of the value of money, “as if it were just a commodity like sugar and she just wondered how much I required of it”.

As it turned out, his drawings, intended for the English translation of Bonaparte’s Flyda of the Seas: A Fairy Tale for Grown Ups, were rejected by the publisher. Shortly afterwards – in 1947 or 1948 – he gave this one to his friend Sonia Brownell, who, late in 1949, married George Orwell. A noted beauty, she was known as “the Euston Road Venus” and was the model for Julia, “the girl from the fiction department”, in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

There are visual and personal complications to both the drawing and the gift. This was the time when Freud formulated his first mature style, in sharply focused and closely observed works on paper. It was also the period in which Freud’s work came closest to Surrealism. George Melly, who worked at the London Gallery, where Freud showed in 1947, noted that his early portraits, “displayed, whether he liked it or not, a surreal sensibility”. For his part, Freud soon decided that Surrealism was too stagey; he preferred reality. After all, in the artist’s words, “what is more surreal than a nose between two eyes?”

Nonetheless, there is something not quite naturalistic about the way these two faces are juxtaposed. Is the self-portrait glimpsed through a window or in a mirror? In any case, Freud is not looking at the woman in profile, but out of the picture at the viewer. Ostensibly, she is Kitty Garman, with whom he began a relationship in 1947 and married in 1948. But the female face also resembles Sonia Brownell’s. She and Freud were close in the late ’40s, when he sent her letters and postcards beginning, “Darling Sonia”. Two people are depicted in this drawing, but there is a hint that a third is present.