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“... unique and contingent. And yet surely that’s also the drive behind the finest paintings by Lucian Freud. More frequently, the camera’s capacity to collect evidence disrupts whatever is painting-like about the image. Photos by Tina Barney, a portraitist of contemporary aristocracy, share space with Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews. For all the ...”

“... use of what is intimate and close-by as subject matter has contemporary resonances (Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud) and historical ones (from Chardin’s studio-bound way of working to Cézanne’s Provençal landscape beat, and the dusty, unchanging workspaces of Giacometti and Morandi). The dedication of life to work suggests that art is a long and ...”

“... a tradition of proletariat painting stretching back to Daumier. They might not have the force of Lucian Freud’s portraits, but Frankfurther’s paintings hold their own, finding something distinctive in their evasive and melancholy subjects. They couldn’t be further from the proto-Pop world of the Independent Group, or the futuristic and dystopian ...”

“... scale. How much better about ourselves it makes us feel that our greatest living artist, now that Lucian Freud is dead, is back from California to celebrate an undervisited corner of agricultural East Yorkshire and make it glorious. The exhibition is full of signs of proud Englishness, and of spring and summer; it thumbs its nose at austerity and ...”

“... The Forest at Pontaubert. His preferences trace a line through English art from Gainsborough to Lucian Freud, making a rather pointed detour round the Pre-Raphaelites but spending arguably too long in what he himself called the ‘virtuous fog’ of Bloomsbury, represented here by an Omega dinner service intended to celebrate famous women, badly ...”

“... detail and, like Wilkie, turned to the profitable business of portraiture. In our time Lucian Freud found the shift from little brushes to big ones a relief. In Wilkie’s case the sheer effort and time which went into one detailed painting may have told, but a look at his early work invites other thoughts. First, just as the late pictures ...”

“... which gives the artist both his being and his significance, rather than the other way round. Lucian Freud made the same point once with a brilliant aside. Any words which might come out of his mouth concerning his art, he remarked, are about as relevant to that art as the noise a tennis player produces when playing a shot. He wrote one article for ...”

“... The first time​ I saw Lucian Freud’s prints I was repulsed, for reasons I could not have explained. Freud’s paintings of female flesh can be difficult to look at, but these were monochrome portrait heads, etched in hard black line. Did I find them cruel? I’m not sure ...”

“... do it. Photography has so far subdued the power of painting to embellish personality that when Lucian Freud (who in his prices, subjects and reputation is the closest thing we have to a dominant face-painter of Reynolds’s calibre) paints the Queen (as Reynolds painted the Prince of Wales) or Kate Moss undressed (as Reynolds painted Kitty Fisher), it ...”

“... Jan van Eyck (The Complete Paintings of the Van Eycks, 1968). Hughes greatly admires, for example, Lucian Freud, who stands prominently on his post-war shortlist of two dozen or so artists. One could forgive the reader of Culture of Complaint for thinking that a remark such as ‘so haunting an erotic tenderness’ (apropos of Girl With Roses, in ...”

“... as C. Eliot Hodgkin’s pictures of plants on London bomb sites, there is a little picture here by Lucian Freud of buddleia, a major coloniser of abandoned buildings and waste ground and the plant most often to be seen in his big pictures of house-backs and overgrown junk seen from a high window.After overgrown gardens the geometry of well-tended rows is ...”

“... of 1509, seems to us more ‘naked’, and more modern – akin to the work of Schiele or Lucian Freud – than his engraving of a perfectly proportioned Apollonian Adam. The previous iteration of The Renaissance Nude in Los Angeles included a fine example of a late 15th-century Florentine drawing of studio lads in their underwear. It is natural ...”

“... she acquired the nickname ‘Dirty Nina’ – but she continued to meet artists, including Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, who admired her and her work. Where are these later drawings now? Lost? Sold for a drink or some spare change? Many years before, she had given away drawings by Modigliani and Gaudier-Brzeska, handing them out to strangers at ...”

“... a less threatened way, Hockney has depicted himself (naked) in a pally face-to-face with Picasso. Lucian Freud did versions of Watteau and Chardin. Howard Hodgkin was an exuberant hommagiste, with offerings to Degas, Corot, Morandi, Matisse, Samuel Palmer, Ellsworth Kelly, Vuillard and Seurat. Such conversations are nourishing, necessary and ...”

“... poems kept coming, and by 1944 a Selected, The Glass Tower, came out, expensively illustrated by Lucian Freud. He got married to a woman called Priscilla Craig, whom he adored, they had a daughter, and his prosperous-looking figure in its well-cut suit stood out amid the squalor of Tambimuttu’s Poetry London offices. But in 1948 it all began to ...”