Acquavella Galleries, New York

Acquired directly from the abo💎ve by the present owner in ᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ2000

New York, Acquavella Galleries, Lucian Freud: Recent Works 1997-2000, 2000, n.p., no. 25, illustrated in colour 

Sebastian Smee, Lucian Freud: 1996-2005, London 2005, n.p., no. 37, illustrated in colour

Sebastian Smee, Freud at Work, London 2006, p. 144, illustr🐻ation 🌟of the work in progress; and p. 147, illustrated in colour

William Feaver, Lucian Freud, New York 2006, n.p., no. 306, i🧸llustrated in colour 

Colour: The colour in the printed catalogue is fairly accurate, although there are less red undertones in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is a small loss to the extreme top edge of the top left corner. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra violet light.
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“The portrait required a total of twenty-nine sittings, each one lasting two hours and beginning precisely at 8am. I enjoyed sitting for Lucian as he was great company. It was an honour to be painted by him.”  

Lord Fellowes

Freud’s fascination with the portrait is restricted solely to those closest to him, his everyday life, and the places he is familiar with. Indeed, he has said that “I work from people that interest me, 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. Lord Fellowes certainly falls in to the latter category. A former Guards officer of the British army, banker and brother-in-law to Diana, Princess of Wales, Fellowes was, by the time he met Freud, working in the Royal Household as Private Secretary to The Queen. Freud and Fellowes’ relationship grew from the six-year-long delicate negotiations for Freud’s commission to paint arguably his most high profile portrait, HM Queen Elizabeth II, 2000-01. Fellowes and Freud would occasionally lunch together at White’s in St James’ (it has been reported that Freud was the only guest not to have worn a tie to the traditional gentleman’s club), and over the years formed a friendship. In February of 1999, Fellowes left his post in the Royal ꦆHousehold having announced his retirement the previous summer and was subsequently made a life peer, taking the title Baron Fellowes, of Shotesham in the County of Norfolk. One can assume that Lord Fellowes’ retirement allowed him the freedom to finally sit for Freud. The rigorous schedule that Freud demands from his sitters combined with Fellowes’ own rigorous schedule of work in the Royal Household would no doubt have prevented the possibility of an earlier sitting. Amongst other topics, the long hours spent together during the course of Fellowes' portrait were undoubtedly used by Freud to enquire about his sitter’s former employer and the forthcoming Royal commission.

Freud’s portrait of Fellowes is loaded with physicality and vigorous paint application; swathes of umber and sienna brushwork pack the small canvas with an explosive energy. The small format of this painting evokes memories of the intimate and meticulous paintings of the early 1950s; yet, unlike the corporeal textures and the refined variations in colour of delicate flesh particular to his earlier works, the thick impastoed surface of the present work offers a more tactile reality. With specific reference to Robert Fellowes, Sebastian Smee notes, “Everything one feels in front of Freud’s paintings has to do with the means by which it is conveyed – the paint. He can pack more energy and specifically anchored imagination into a few square inches of brush-work than anyone alive. There is no rational formulation behind the congeries of brushstrokes that constitutes the head portrait, for instance of Robert Fellowes. Blockish tonal shifts that convey modelling vie with surface particularities, and all this exists in tension with the rhythmic relations Freud sets up over the canvas – especially the slightly oblique, downward brushstrokes that convey the pull of gravity on his looser features.  Somehow, it all coheres to produce an intensified reality. The result puts across something of the subject’s intelligence and discretion, perhaps even its modesty” (Sebastien Smee, Lucian Freud: Recent Work 1996-2005, London 2005, p. 7).

The present painting is an exquisite testament to the superlative power of Lucian Freud’s preoccupation with the single-figure portrait. If Freud, as Robert Hughes once declared, was the world’s ‘greatest living realist painter’ then it is the single-figure subject that best affords the artist the opportunity of displaying his unquestionably masterful ability to capture the mood and furthermore the inner essence of his sitters. Freud’s genius is to present in his work the totality of the 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).