Featuring voluptuous creases and curves, thick brushstrokes and fleshy contours, And the Bridegroom (1st Version) is a tender first iteration of one of the most celebrated and momentous paintings ever created by Lucian Freud. Choosing to move onto a larger canvas for it's full-scale iteration, Freud's composition is suspended in the present work, and yet the facture of execution here and virtuosic treatment of flesh and facial features bespeaks the mastery of its creator. Presenting faceted planes of medium, with shifting tones lending form, this relaxed and moving portrait of Leigh Bowery and Nicola Bateman takes its title from a line in the poem “Epithalamium” by the classical English scholar and poet A. E. Houseman. An epithalamium, traditionally, was a poem sung in celebration of a marriage. Like a sonnet it has no fixed form, and the many which exist range from forty to four hundred lines, however they often feature mention of a specific marriage, blessings for the union and wishes for happiness. Married in May, 1994, their marriage only lasted a few months before Bowery died of AIDS on New Year’s Eve of the same year. A flamboyant and outlandish performance artist, Bowery captivated Freud. After painting him so consistently for many years, the two men grew close as friends. When Bowery passed in 1994, Freud’s relationship with Bateman, both as model and friend, became increasingly protective as they grieved together. Inscribed “NB from LF” on the reverse, Freud gifted the unfinished canvas of And the Bridegroom (1^st Version) to Bateman who owned the work until Freud later helped her to sell it in 1998 to buy a home for herself and her daughter.

Both in terms of size and sheer massiveness of form, the 1990s would see the production of some of Freud’s most impressive works. His career already stretching over half a century, Freud’s reaction was to intensify his efforts. Though widely regarded as Britain’s greatest living painter, even in the face of such plaudits, Freud refused to succumb to a late style. The present work and Freud’s choice to refocus his efforts onto a larger format for this subject is a test.mes nt to Freud’s relentless determination as an artist. Freud noted that his aim in painting was “to try and move the senses by giving an intensification of reality” (Lucian Freud, “Some Thoughts on Painting”, Encounter, Vol. III, No. 1, 1954, p. 23). Freud was a master of translating physical circumstances, experiences, and relationships into compositions that communicate universal truths on human psychology and emotion. His corpus is replete with canvases that capture within their border’s instances of intense intimacy and privacy; his work reading as a dedicated and minute study of personal human moments. Coming from one of the most productive decades of Freud’s career And the Bridegroom (1^st Version) visualises the embedded layers of two arresting and evocative figures which lie at the heart of Freud’s late life and work.