Expert Voices: James Sevier on Lucian Freud’s “Ib Reading”
Image: © David Dawson, All Rights Reserved 2023/Bridgeman Images
Artwork: © The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2023/Bridgeman Images
"Ears, lips, breast and belly, the cushioning, the balancing, veins snaking and muscles flexed: these are offset in the paintings by silk and chafed goatskin, mahogany veneer, mottled plaster, tidelines of cotton rags, two pages of Proust (in Ib Reading) rendered into silvery blur. Naked or clothed, the volunteers settle into position. Meditative as they appear to us to be, jittery or patient, anxious or complacent, for Freud they are the stuff of fascination."
Executed in 1997, Ib Reading is an exquisite test.mes nt to the superlative power of Lucian Freud’s preoccupation with the single-figure portrait – a fascination that spanned over seven decades and lies at the very heart of the artist's dynamic oeuvre. If Freud, as Robert Hughes once declared, was the world’s ‘greatest living realist painter’ then it was the single-figure subject that best afforded the artist the opportunity to display his unquestionably masterful ability to capture the mood and, furthermore, the inner essence of his sitters. Freud’s genius was to present in his work the totality of self in all its complex variations. As Bruce Bernard wrote, “The essence of [Freud’s]… genius in the perception of human beings is felt most keenly when he has asked one person who interests him, both in look and character, to submit to his scrutiny and help him realise their truest possible image in paint.” (Bruce Bernard, Lucian Freud, New York, 1996, p. 12). Daughter of Freud and Suzy Boyt, Isobel Boyt is painted in Ib Reading with exceptional prowess in a portrait that is at once tender and meditative, intimate and contemplative. Evoking the relationship between father and daughter, artist and sitter, the present work illuminates Freud’s mastery in the genre of portraiture. The artist’s exacting technique and sensational brushwork is, on the surface of the present work, at its finest; the late 1990s indeed mark the very apex of Freud’s career. Held in the same private collects ion since shortly after its execution in 1997, Ib Reading captures a profoundly private moment, and in doing so succeeds in grasping the pure essence of humanity, a feat which lies at the very core of Freud’s greater oeuvre.
Right: Lucian Freud, Large Interior, Paddington, 1968-69. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. Image/Artwork: © The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2023/Bridgeman Images.
Image: © David Dawson, All Rights Reserved 2023/Bridgeman Images
Private collects ion
Image/Artwork: © The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2023/Bridgeman Images
Ib Reading is one of several portraits Freud painted of Isobel at different ages throughout his career, the first being Large Interior. Paddington of 1968-69 now in the collects ion of Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. Another, slightly later portrait from 1977-78 entitled Portrait of Ib resides in the collects ion of Cleveland Art Museum and depicts Isobel nude as a teenager. These nuanced portrayals of Isobel are part of a wider cycle of portraits Freud painted of his children; these were often made after what were several years of paternal absence and the process of their making formed a way for the artist to get to know his children better. Within the entirety of Freud’s oeuvre only a small percentage of his sitters were designated by name, indeed, by naming his sitters in these paintings Freud was making a formal acknowledgment of his children through his art. As William Feaver asserts, "To name [his children] was to acknowledge them, to paint them was to get to know them after the missing years of childhood." (William Feaver, Lucian Freud, London, 2002, p. 35). As a result, Ib Reading reflects a familial intimacy between artist and sitter. Freud’s portraits of his children rank among the most significant within his celebrated oeuvre. He did not take commissions and always had a specific reason to paint a particular person that was close to him. As Freud himself reflected, “My work is purely autobiographical. It is about myself and my surroundings. It is an attempt at a record. I work from people that interest.mes and that I care about, in rooms that I live in and know. I use the people to invent my pictures with, and I can work more freely when they are there.” (Lucian Freud, quoted in: Exh. Cat., London, National Portrait Gallery, Lucian Freud: Portraits, 2012, p. 14). Turning his masterful and exacting gaze and brush towards his daughter Isobel, in Ib Reading Freud captures the physicality and psychology of his sitter with the confidence and expression inherent to his mature style.
Rendered with meticulous detail and a liberal use of rich impasto, the surface of Ib Reading exhibits the breathtaking and calculated brushwork inherent to Freud’s portraits of the 1990s: “As t.mes went by, Freud’s brushstrokes became looser and pastier, but his way of working remained slow and deliberate, with compositions taking shape through multiple, successive layers of paint. He also started to paint standing up, so that he could move around his models, affording him a physical proximity that allowed him to notice the tiniest details.” (Paloma Alarcó quoted in: Exh. Cat., London, The National Gallery, Lucian Freud, 2022, p. 154). Freud referred to the finished composition of Ib Reading as ‘The Ibscape’ and Isobel herself reminisced about the duration for which she sat for her father: “That one took forever: all the volumes of Remembrance of Things Past and one or two other books too.” (Isobel Boyt quoted in: William Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud, London, 2020, p. 331).
Women Reading through Art History
“I ask the people because I want to paint from them, not because they are good sitters.”
In the present work, Isobel holds Marcel Proust’s volume on her lap, her feet resting on the chair opposite in a pose of serenity and relaxed contentment. In its subject and depiction, Ib Reading belongs to a long tradition of classical portraits of women reading, from Piero di Cosimo and Vermeer, to Berthe Morisot, Van Gogh, Matisse, and Picasso. This quiet, contemplative portrait also evokes James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, best known as Whistler’s Mother, from 1871. Like Whistler’s Mother, Ib Reading depicts a woman – and indeed a close family member – sitting for an artist with a pose of infinite patience and repose. Freud’s bravura brushwork also echoes Whistler’s soft depiction of flesh and white lace. Ib Reading also draws upon Henri Matisse's Girl Reading, Vase of Flowers, from 1922, a similarly meditative masterpiece that presents a female sitter quietly reading. Like Freud's portrayal of Ib, Matisse depicts the young girl gazing down at two open pages of a book within a domestic, interior scene. These art historical portraits are at once tranquil and harmonious, their respective sitters relaxed and at ease. Ib Reading powerfully draws upon this canon of contemplative images. Like many sitters before her, Isobel's head and eyes are angled downward towards the pages of Proust; she does not confront the viewer, rather we confront her in a moment of privacy. Freud captures an intensely intimate moment, and in doing so embraces the essence of his chosen subject, achieved through a meticulous observation of the most important people in his life. As Freud himself noted, "Who are closer than my children?"
Musee d’Orsay, Paris
Image: © Scala, Florence
Private collects ion
Artwork: © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2023
The innately meditative quality of the present work is magnified by the fact that Isobel is captured by Freud reading Proust. Her eyes do not.mes et the viewer, but rather she gazes down at two pages of Remembrance of Things Past, which lie open, resting on her lap. While Scott Moncrieff famously translated Proust’s title to ‘Remembrance of Things Past,’ the original French title ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ translates directly to ‘In Search of Lost t.mes ’. It is poignant that Isobel chose to read this volume during the hours she sat for Freud, and poignant too that Freud included these pages in his portrait of his daughter. Remembrance of Things Past is Proust’s allegorical search for the truth, and his meditation on the ability to reconstruct the past through memory. This painterly reference thus alludes to the notion of lost t.mes between father and daughter, the portrait becoming a symbol for the recovery of this lost t.mes between the two. Having t.mes in the studio together, for Freud, may have made up for the lost.mes mories due to his frequent absence throughout Isobel’s childhood. The large wooden chest in Freud’s studio depicted in the background of Ib Reading is also mnemonically significant. It held letters, telegrams, and photographs from as early as the 1940s and Freud would often rummage through this chest. In a literal sense this became for the artist a ‘chest of memories’. Feaver describes this chest in Ib Reading in his 2020 biography of the artist: “The painting was enlarged on every side, the better to contain the plan chest with tarnished brass handles in which her father kept the letters, telegrams and photos that he liked to rummage through in search of pertinent items: for example, the letter from Peter Watson sent, at his request, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1941 to greet him when he landed there, and the tiny head of a ferocious Barbara Skelton originally intended as a wedding present. Fifty years on such things had become distantly agreeable” (William Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud, London, 2020, p. 331). Both the Proust volume and the chest suggest a prevailing theme of nostalgia and memory, and of Freud’s own reflection on t.mes past.
“In 2004, Ib talked about how, as a child, she hated having to sit for her father, and one can see why it wouldn’t have been much fun. However, in recent years she has seen sitting as ‘a way of having a relationship with my father.'”
Image: © David Dawson, All rights reserved 2023/Bridgeman Images
Artwork: © The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2023/Bridgeman Images
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). Apart from his self-portraits, he has portrayed other artists (such as Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach), friends and lovers, from criminals to the aristocracy. It is, however, the portraits of his family members which make up the most significant proportion of these works, and arguably are the most intimate and revealing. He consistently painted, drew and etched his children throughout his life, noting that “People are driven toward making works of art, not by familiarity with the process by which this is done, but by the necessity to communicate their feeling about the object of their choice with such intensity that the feelings become infectious" (Lucian Freud quoted in: William Feaver, Lucian Freud, London, 2002, p. 35). Ib Reading is a wonderfully intimate exemplification of this notion. Tender, delicate, transfixing, and well known within Freud's celebrated canon of portraits, this painting unassailably broadcasts the hallmarks of a twentieth-century master.
What do these paintings reveal about Lucian Freud? | National Gallery
