“Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait, even if it’s only a chair.”
Image: © John Deakin / John Deakin Archive / Bridgeman Images
Beautiful and full of emotive depth, Night Interior is an astonishing and defining image in Lucian Freud’s oeuvre. Depicting Penny Cuthbertson naked and resting in the artist’s Paddington studio, Freud captures the delicate poise of her turned head and the sinuous curves of her body through a virtuoso of looping, arching brushstrokes to deliver a painting full of impulse and exacting, spectacular detail. In the present work Cuthbertson appears relaxed and serene, her head tilted to one side, slightly away from the painter, her eyes shut, dreaming. Indeed, the viewer glimpses an intimate moment of privacy within the glowing light of Freud’s studio. In this entrancing portrait, Freud captures an intensely private moment, and in doing so he succeeds in grasping the pure essence of humanity, a feat which lies at the core of his greater repertoire. Between 1966 and 1970 Freud executed seven portraits of Cuthbertson, his most important sitter of the period. This group of portraits comes to a magnificent conclusion in the present work, the very final painting of her. In his celebrated autobiography on Freud, William Feaver writes that this group of works were, “transformative, there was a dawning assurance in the way she presented herself and the way he painted her, there on the floor, first awake then sleeping, confidently relaxed, her skin lustrous, her status as a ‘nude’ no big deal… she was the practiced accomplice, inured to posing casually” (William Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth 1922-68, London 2022, p. 596). As an instantly recognisable work within Freud’s celebrated canon of portraiture, Night Interior exemplifies the artist’s exacting technique and sensational attention to detail.
This painting is an exquisite test.mes nt to the superlative power of Freud’s preoccupation with the single-figure portrait – a fascination that spanned over seven decades and lies at the very heart of his oeuvre. Freud’s fascination with the portrait was restricted solely to those closest to him and his everyday life in places he was familiar with. Indeed, he once said that “I work from people that interest.mes , and that I care about and think about, in rooms that I live and know" (Lucian Freud quoted in: John Russell, Lucian Freud, London, 1974, p. 13). Night Interior powerfully encompasses everything about Freud in one painting: the artist, the model, and the studio; his entire environment is here summed up in striking detail. As critic and author Sebastian Smee has written: “Freud’s portraits do not presume to know their subjects definitively… Instead, they do something far more subversive and, in the end, moving. Even as he scrutinises his models with the utmost intensity, Freud powerfully registers their unknowability. In doing so, he grants them a depth of human freedom; this in turn provokes an impulse in the viewer to accord them a genuine, a believable reality” (Sebastian Smee, Lucian Freud, London 2005, p. 7). Painted with exceptional prowess, Night Interior is at once tender and meditative, intimate and contemplative.
Image: © Bridgeman Images
Freud met Cuthbertson in the late 1960s, and the artist himself reminisced about their introduction: “I met her a party at Sheridan’s my ex-brother-in-law. [Sheridan Dufferin, a backer of the Kasmin gallery.] I was a frustrated painter of nudes and wanted to do something about it. She sat mostly during the day, once she’d stopped being a nanny” (Lucian Freud quoted in: William Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth 1922-68, London 2022, p. 595). The very first portraits of her from 1966, Naked Girl and Girl on a Turkish Sofa, show Cuthbertson at “twenty-three when Freud first knew her and game for being painted first clothed then naked on a sofa, her hair dishevelled, her lips parted as if to spout a trendy mid-sixties mock-cockney accent, the soles of her feet grubby from the bare boards of Gloucester Terrace” (William Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth 1922-68, London 2022, p. 595). The following year in 1968 Freud painted her on three more occasions (Girl Holding a Towel, Woman in a Fur Coat and Naked Girl Asleep I). Naked Girl Asleep II from 1968 marks the penultimate portrait of Cuthbertson, before the cycle came to a magnificent close with the present work. As the outstanding finale of portraits depicting Cuthbertson, Night Interior is also the most exquisitely detailed and resolved, revealing her small fragile body against the celebrated backdrop of Freud’s Paddington studio.
LUCIAN FREUD’S PAINTINGS OF PENNY CUTHBERTSON
“[These paintings were] transformative, there was a dawning assurance in the way she presented herself and the way he painted her, there on the floor, first awake then sleeping, confidently relaxed, her skin lustrous, her status as a ‘nude’ no big deal… she was the practiced accomplice, inured to posing casually.”
Private collects ion
Image/Artwork: © The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2023 / Bridgeman Images
In the present work, Cuthbertson sleeps on a chair in front of a large window, which looks out onto the view represented in works from the same period such as Wasteground, Paddington from (1970-72) and Wasteground with Houses, Paddington (1970-72). This nuanced interior view of his studio therefore stands alongside the gritty urban landscapes he was painting at the same t.mes ; both groups of work celebrate London as a city paramount to Freud’s life and work, with the locale of his studio pivotally anchoring the compositions. In Night Interior, the studio and all of its content are subject to the same scrutiny and vulnerability as Cuthbertson: The floorboards are executed in exacting detail, while the porcelain of the large tub, sink and boiler to the right of the composition gleams in prismatic hues of white, blue, soft umber and grey. There is an intensity in the composition and scale of the present painting, and the extremely fine detailing echoes Freud’s earlier work. To the left of the composition, a tall wardrobe stands haphazardly open next to the darkened window. Remarkably, the viewer can glimpse Freud’s overcoat and boots, which alongside the great studio, alludes to the presence of the artist within this naked portrait. There is one more salient allusion to the artist himself, and that is in the reflection in the darkened window behind Cuthbertson. There is a glowing reflection of the studio gaslight, and shadowy hints of the artist’s form, his brush and his easel.
Private collects ion
Image: © The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2023 / Bridgeman Images
“He completed seven paintings of Penny Cuthbertson (“I did think ‘I’m going to do a whole lot of them’”) between 1966 and 1970. They were transformative, there was a dawning assurance in the way she presented herself and the way he painted her, there on the floor, first awake then sleeping, confidently relaxed, her skin lustrous, her status as a ‘nude’ no big deal… She was the practiced accomplice, inured to posing casually.”
Image: © John Deakin / John Deakin Archive / Bridgeman Images
Tate Modern, London
Image/Artwork: © The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2023 / Bridgeman Images
Alongside the self-portrait, the naked portrait was the defining leitmotif of Freud’s career. Across sixty years of painting, innumerable mutations of painterly style, and a multitude of sitters, he returned to this subject t.mes and again. It was, in many ways, the greatest challenge of his career; a problem to which he never found a solution: “All portraits are difficult for me. But a nude presents different challenges. When someone is naked, there is in effect nothing to be hidden. You are stripped of your cost.mes , as it were. Not everyone wants to be that honest about themselves. That.mes ans I feel an obligation to be equally honest in how I represent their honesty. It’s a matter of responsibility. I’m not trying to be a philosopher. I’m more of a realist. I’m just trying to see and understand the people that make up my life” (Lucian Freud quoted in: Phoebe Hoban, Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open, Seattle 2014, p. 100).
Image: © John Deakin / John Deakin Archive / Bridgeman Images
University of Liverpool Art Gallery & collects ions, Liverpool
Image/Artwork: © The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2023 / Bridgeman Images
The present work has prestigious exhibition history; Night Interior was a formative part of Freud’s first major UK retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London in 1974, which travelled on to Bristol City Art Gallery, Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery and Leeds City Museum and Art Gallery later that year. It was also included in the seminal Centre Georges Pompidou show Lucian Freud. L’Atelier in Paris in 2010, and six years later in the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s loan exhibition Lucian Freud between 2016 and 2018. As such we bear witness to one of the most important and well-regarded works not only in Freud’s oeuvre, but moreover within the entire representation of the naked portrait in the Twentieth Century. Tender, delicate, transfixing, and well known within Freud's celebrated canon of portraits, this painting unassailably broadcasts the hallmarks of a twentieth-century master.