Lucian freud biography william feaver family practice

Lucian Freud (1922–2011) is one of the great painters of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Though ferociously private, for more than twenty years he spoke every week to his confidante and collaborator William Feaver – about painting and the art world, but also about his life and loves.

Lucian freud biography william feaver family practice

The result is a unique, electrifying biography, that, shot through with Freud’s own words, is also autobiography.

In Youth, the first of two volumes, Feaver conjures Freud’s beginnings – Sigmund Freud’s grandson, born into a well-to-do middle-class Jewish family in Weimar Berlin, escaping Nazi Germany in 1933 before being dropped into successive English public schools.

Following Freud through his teenage discovery of Soho – the Café Royal and the louche Coffee An’, his time as a Merchant Seaman during the war, his post-war adventures in Paris and Greece, and his setting up as a painter in the then-seedy Maida Vale, Feaver traces a brilliant, difficult young man