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The first room contains work from Freud's art school days, through to the early 1950s.
The earliest work in the exhibition, Box of Apples in Wales 1939, was painted in the year Freud started
at the Central School of Art, London.
He spent only a few months there before going on to the more informal East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing
in Essex, run by Cedric Morris.
In 1948 Freud married Kitty Garman, daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein and the collector Kathleen Garman.
Kitty appears in a number of portraits, including Girl with Roses 1947-8 and Girl with a White Dog 1950-1.
In 1951 Freud was one of sixty artists invited to submit a painting for the Arts Council's Sixty Paintings for 51
exhibition during the Festival of Britain.
Interior in Paddington 1951 was one of five awarded a
£500 purchase prize.
Also in the early 1950s Freud painted portraits of two contemporary artists: Francis Bacon and John Minton.
The portrait of Bacon could not be included in this exhibition, as it was stolen in 1988, when it was on loan from the
Tate Gallery to a gallery in Berlin.
The portrait of John Minton 1952, which he commissioned
after seeing the one of Bacon, was bequeathed at Minton's death in 1957 to the Royal College of Art, where he had
been a teacher. |
