Room 3
Hotel Bedroom 1954
This double portrait shows Lucian Freud, in shadow against the light from the window, with his second wife,
Caroline Blackwood, in a hotel bedroom in Paris.
The pair had married in the previous year, when Caroline was 22.
Paintings such as this were, at the time, regarded by many as shocking, violent and cruel.
Caroline wrote, much later, that she 'was dismayed, and others were mystified as to why he needed to paint a girl,
who at that point still looked childish, as so distressingly old'.
This painting was one of the last Freud painted in his earlier style.
It was shown in the British Pavilion at the 1954 Venice Biennale, alongside work by Francis Bacon and Ben
Nicholson.
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