Lucian Freud: Plant Portraits

Thoughtful exhibition at the Garden Museum focusing on Lucien Freud’s painting of plants and gardens.

With just a few works the show told the story clearly and comprehensively beginning with drawings from when he was six kept by his mother of trees.

There were sections on his portraits of people with flowers and his paintings of the gardens and backyards outside his studios which one description called an anti-garden.

I loved the inclusion of a room on his murals of cyclamen both at his own home at Croome in Dorset and Chatsworth which included the painting materials he left behind, presumably to finish the work on a future trip.

The main fact I took away is that the zimmerlindes which appear in a lot of his pictures was probably a descendent of one in Sigmund Freud’s office in Vienna and the plant became a family emblem.

Closes 5 March 2023


Review

Telegraph


 

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