About a Boy: intimate portrait up for auction
Some portraits are painted to commission. The sitter, or their family, pays the artist a fee and keeps the painting. Other artists use models, in which case the sitter may be paid a fee but the artist gets to keep, and sell, the painting.
Either of these arrangements can result in fine work, but both are transactions at heart and require an element of professional remove. When an artist paints a portrait of somebody that they know, and connect with emotionally, the work can have a different quality altogether.
Lucian Freud’s Head of a Boy (1956) is coming up for auction at Sotheby’s, London, on March 5, with an estimate of stg£4.5 to stg£6.5m (€4,990,000 to €7,210,000). It’s a portrait of his lifelong friend Garech Browne (1939-2018), Guinness heir, custodian of Luggala Estate, founder of Claddagh records, and general Irish cultural icon.
“There’s a real connection between artist and sitter,” says Tom Eddison, expert in contemporary art at Sotheby’s. Although it’s not known precisely how the painting came about, it’s unlikely to have been a commission.
“Freud didn’t work that way. He wouldn’t have painted someone he wasn’t interested in and he didn’t take direction from anyone. They were friends and it led to a portrait.” It’s a small painting (18 x 18cm), a tender close-up of the boy’s face, with exquisite fine-brushwork and a real bang of emotional intensity about it. There’s a good story behind it too.
Garech Browne is famous, depending on where you’re standing, for rescuing Irish traditional music from the doldrums, giving interestingly bohemian parties, and for letting the public scamper all over his Co Wicklow Estate. In the late 1980s, the beautiful white house at Luggala was separated by a small sign that might have read “Keep Off the Grass”. It politely requested that the public came no further. The rest of the estate was our playground. It wasn’t that we had permission to be there, it was just that nobody stopped us.
The house remained a mystery, though most of us claimed to know someone that had been to one of his parties. In Robert O’Byrne’s, Luggala Days: The Story of a Guinness House (2012), the actor John Hurt described the set up: “Here he collects poets and pipers, Druids, drunks, landed and stranded gentry. He likes to have his friends about him.” Now, the 18-century hunting lodge and 5,000-acre estate are for sale, with an advertised price of €28m.
Lucian Freud (1922-2011) first came to Luggala in the 1940s with his wife Kitty and eloped with Browne’s cousin, Lady Caroline Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood in 1952. The painting coming up for auction at Sotheby’s is Freud’s second attempt at painting Garech’s portrait. O’Byrne records Browne’s comment.
“He was painting my portrait at Luggala when the house caught fire in 1956, so he gave the unfinished version to Caroline and started again.” The page of the Luggala visitors book signed by Lucian and Caroline Freud in that year ends with the bald statement in block capitals: “Luggala burnt down.”
The whereabouts of the first unfinished portrait is not public knowledge. Presumably it’s out there somewhere. “There’s no record that it has been destroyed,” says Eddison cautiously.
Its successor was painted at Luggala during what the auctioneers describe as “a potentially fractious moment in the course of Freud’s tempestuous second marriage.” Freud and Caroline acrimoniously separated in 1957, barely a year after it was painted.
Despite the family turmoil, and their 17-year age difference, the friendship between Browne and Freud survived. “Perhaps the person from whom I learned most was Lucian Freud,” Browne recalled in Luggala Days. “Lucian subsequently introduced me to many interesting people, including Francis Bacon, and brought me around the Louvre.”
“Freud was very influential on Garech from a very young age — introducing him to a rich and interesting medley of creative types and sneaking him into clubs in London.” Eddison says.
“What is so wonderful about his paintings from this period is the narrative behind them. They’re a fascinating view of what his life was like, and the worlds of high and low culture that he stepped between.”
Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction takes place at 34-35, New Bond Street, London, on Tuesday, March 5 at 7pm. See sothebys.com
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