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Lot Essay
Ria, Naked Portrait (2006-2007) is a late masterpiece by one of the twentieth century’s greatest painters. A young woman reclines naked on a wrought-iron bed made with quilted cream sheets that crease and crumple with majestic virtuosity. Her face, cushioned and silhouetted against a pristine white pillow, bears the distinctive hand of Lucian Freud’s celebrated mature style: it is modelled to a near-sculptural relief of impasto and framed by fantastic daubs of warm golden curls. The sitter is Ria Kirby, the twenty-five-year-old art handler whom Freud had met at the Victoria & Albert Museum on the occasion of his joint exhibition with Frank Auerbach in 2006. She would become one of the most significant models to sit for the artist in his final decade. These sittings, which took place over a marathon stretch of sixteen months—seven evenings a week and up to five hours at a time—culminated in this single, thrilling portrait. Invigorated by the commercial and reputational success of his partnership with New York art dealer William Acquavella in 1992, Freud unleashed newfound artistic fervour in his late career. Ambition oozed into all aspects of his practice: from the volume of paintings and etchings he produced to the sheer monumentality of his canvases. Ria, Naked Portrait was his widest to date, stretching well over five feet. Testament to its significance, the painting would later hang alone in the final room of the National Portrait Gallery’s landmark exhibition Lucian Freud Portraits in 2012. The show, which was five years in the making and opened just one year after the artist’s death, was the most popular ticketed exhibition in the gallery’s history.
Ria Kirby approached Freud while hanging his pictures at the V&A. A painter herself—she had previously studied at the Camberwell College of Arts—she expressed her admiration for his work. ‘That girl I met’, Freud confided in Martin Gayford shortly after, ‘I think I could work from her’ (L. Freud quoted in M. Gayford, ‘Lucian Freud: marathon man’, The Telegraph, 22 September 2007). And so it was arranged. Kirby agreed, and within twenty-four hours she was in Freud’s studio on Kensington Church Street with a cup of tea. Each evening, Kirby would arrive promptly to the studio at 6:30pm after her full day’s work at the museum. It was Freud’s second scheduled slot of the day; these later ‘night paintings’ were executed in artificial light from four hanging bulbs, which the artist could individually dim and control. Both conscientious and fastidious, Freud and Kirby worked together symbiotically. Then in his mid-eighties, he continued to paint ferociously; the pair took all but four evenings off within this sixteen-month period. Indeed, Kirby was, by Freud’s famously demanding criteria, a perfect sitter: punctual, congenial, and impressively committed. ‘To start with it was quite exhausting, because I had only about 10 minutes’ break between finishing work and beginning to pose’, she remembered. ‘I went through every possible emotion in my life’ (R. Kirby quoted in ibid.).
For Kirby, the sessions soon became therapeutic, meditative, and often surprisingly entertaining. ‘In the first few months the hardest part of sitting was trying to stop laughing’, she recalled, ‘There were so many tales and songs and anecdotes. We went to a dinner once and he made me laugh so much I couldn’t sit up’ (R. Kirby quoted in ibid.). Hungry after many hours of work, the two would go out to Clarke’s just down the road or to the Wolseley in Mayfair. Freud frequented the latter haunt almost every night in his final years and dined at the same corner table. Outside of the studio, the artist’s insatiable observation continued. Together, the pair people-watched and discussed the strange and bemusing characters that spilled in and out of the restaurant rooms.
'… it became second nature, and felt completely natural. I realised there’s no point in trying to be anything. You just have to lie there and be yourself. But in the end I found it quite a release. It was one place where I could be where I didn't have anyone phoning me or hassling me. All I had to do was lie still, which I’m quite good at'
- (R. Kirby, quoted in M. Gayford, ‘Lucian Freud: marathon man’, The Telegraph, 22 September 2007).
Freud began with painting Kirby’s face—as was the case with many of his late portraits including those of Leigh Bowery and Martin Gayford—and progressed outwards to capture each aspect of the composition in exquisite detail. He required his sitters’ presence even when rendering the background or peripheral elements of his compositions. Here, the present image is a tapestry of whorled, painterly patches. Kirby’s flushed skin is built from an intricate variety of hues—the warm, pink blushes of her hands and feet, touches of pale Naples yellow over her stomach and hips, and bluish shadows of her forearms and thighs—as well as the granular texture of Freud’s favoured Cremnitz White. Behind her, a radiator and blue-panelled screen offer glimpses of the artist’s simply furnished West London studio. These densely-worked areas—in which a polyphony of pigments pulsate with life—comprise one of Freud’s defining legacies to painting. He was captivated by time’s betrayal of the human body, the indelible marks it leaves on skin and flesh. ‘Paint ages like we do’, he famously said (L. Freud, quoted in W. Feaver, ‘I was Lucian Freud’s spare pair of eyes’, The Guardian, 8 September 2019).
While he was painting Kirby’s portrait, Freud was in the process of selecting artworks by John Constable—whose work he deeply admired—for a major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 2009. Indeed, the subject of the reclining female nude draws from a rich pedigree of art historical precedents from Giorgione, Titian, and Velázquez—the latter’s ‘Rokeby Venus’ (1647-51) was one of Freud’s favourite paintings at the National Gallery—to Manet, whose stiff eponymous sitter Olympia (1863) also lies over elaborate swathes of stark-white bedlinen. ‘Being naked has to do with making a more complete portrait, a naked body is somehow more permanent, more factual’, Freud said. ‘When someone is naked there is in effect nothing to be hidden. Not everyone wants to be that honest about themselves, that means I feel an obligation to be equally honest in how I represent them. It is a matter of responsibility, in a way I don’t want the painting to come from me, I want it to come from them. It can be extraordinary how much you can learn from someone by looking very carefully at them without judgement’ (L. Freud, quoted in press release for Lucian Freud: Monumental, Acquavella Galleries, New York 2019). Kirby, naked and lying on her side, relaxes and sinks into a comfortable position on the mattress. Her fair, translucent limbs bend and wrap around themselves on pale sheets. Her right hand gently presses into a sunken hold while her left clutches beneath the pillow for support. Her body seems to coalesce with her bed, as their soft and malleable forms weigh and impress upon one another’s shapes in equilibrium.
As the months passed, Freud found the work’s end ever more difficult to ascertain. Photographs taken by his assistant David Dawson during these years show that most of the painting was finished by the autumn of 2006. Though for months Kirby suspected each sitting might be her last, Freud prolonged and postponed its completion: ‘just another few weeks’, he would say (L. Freud quoted in M. Gayford, ‘Lucian Freud: marathon man’, The Telegraph, 22 September 2007). On two occasions, the artist enlarged the canvas with near-invisible sewn extensions. William Feaver suggests that Freud’s slow working, involving countless revisions of the face and consecutive sessions spent mixing colours for just a single brushstroke to be added, was a deliberate attempt to delay the ultimate conclusion of their friendship. Kirby’s knees and neck seemed to ‘[harden] into excrescences’, and each area of ‘accretion was being taken to represent, and justify, time spent’ (W. Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame 1968-2011, London 2020, p. 502).
In Ria, Naked Portrait, we witness some 2,400 hours of observation solidify into high impasto relief. The surface terrain—buttery and thick in some areas, coarse and calcified in others—is testament to this remarkably long gestation. The portrait was finally completed in 2007. This same year, Freud was the subject of the acclaimed retrospective, curated by Catherine Lampert, which began at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and toured to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark and the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. Marking the apex of Freud’s dazzling late fame, Ria, Naked Portrait lays bare the enthralling exchange between the painter and his sitter, and is a tour de force of the art historical portrait tradition.
Ria Kirby approached Freud while hanging his pictures at the V&A. A painter herself—she had previously studied at the Camberwell College of Arts—she expressed her admiration for his work. ‘That girl I met’, Freud confided in Martin Gayford shortly after, ‘I think I could work from her’ (L. Freud quoted in M. Gayford, ‘Lucian Freud: marathon man’, The Telegraph, 22 September 2007). And so it was arranged. Kirby agreed, and within twenty-four hours she was in Freud’s studio on Kensington Church Street with a cup of tea. Each evening, Kirby would arrive promptly to the studio at 6:30pm after her full day’s work at the museum. It was Freud’s second scheduled slot of the day; these later ‘night paintings’ were executed in artificial light from four hanging bulbs, which the artist could individually dim and control. Both conscientious and fastidious, Freud and Kirby worked together symbiotically. Then in his mid-eighties, he continued to paint ferociously; the pair took all but four evenings off within this sixteen-month period. Indeed, Kirby was, by Freud’s famously demanding criteria, a perfect sitter: punctual, congenial, and impressively committed. ‘To start with it was quite exhausting, because I had only about 10 minutes’ break between finishing work and beginning to pose’, she remembered. ‘I went through every possible emotion in my life’ (R. Kirby quoted in ibid.).
For Kirby, the sessions soon became therapeutic, meditative, and often surprisingly entertaining. ‘In the first few months the hardest part of sitting was trying to stop laughing’, she recalled, ‘There were so many tales and songs and anecdotes. We went to a dinner once and he made me laugh so much I couldn’t sit up’ (R. Kirby quoted in ibid.). Hungry after many hours of work, the two would go out to Clarke’s just down the road or to the Wolseley in Mayfair. Freud frequented the latter haunt almost every night in his final years and dined at the same corner table. Outside of the studio, the artist’s insatiable observation continued. Together, the pair people-watched and discussed the strange and bemusing characters that spilled in and out of the restaurant rooms.
'… it became second nature, and felt completely natural. I realised there’s no point in trying to be anything. You just have to lie there and be yourself. But in the end I found it quite a release. It was one place where I could be where I didn't have anyone phoning me or hassling me. All I had to do was lie still, which I’m quite good at'
- (R. Kirby, quoted in M. Gayford, ‘Lucian Freud: marathon man’, The Telegraph, 22 September 2007).
Freud began with painting Kirby’s face—as was the case with many of his late portraits including those of Leigh Bowery and Martin Gayford—and progressed outwards to capture each aspect of the composition in exquisite detail. He required his sitters’ presence even when rendering the background or peripheral elements of his compositions. Here, the present image is a tapestry of whorled, painterly patches. Kirby’s flushed skin is built from an intricate variety of hues—the warm, pink blushes of her hands and feet, touches of pale Naples yellow over her stomach and hips, and bluish shadows of her forearms and thighs—as well as the granular texture of Freud’s favoured Cremnitz White. Behind her, a radiator and blue-panelled screen offer glimpses of the artist’s simply furnished West London studio. These densely-worked areas—in which a polyphony of pigments pulsate with life—comprise one of Freud’s defining legacies to painting. He was captivated by time’s betrayal of the human body, the indelible marks it leaves on skin and flesh. ‘Paint ages like we do’, he famously said (L. Freud, quoted in W. Feaver, ‘I was Lucian Freud’s spare pair of eyes’, The Guardian, 8 September 2019).
While he was painting Kirby’s portrait, Freud was in the process of selecting artworks by John Constable—whose work he deeply admired—for a major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 2009. Indeed, the subject of the reclining female nude draws from a rich pedigree of art historical precedents from Giorgione, Titian, and Velázquez—the latter’s ‘Rokeby Venus’ (1647-51) was one of Freud’s favourite paintings at the National Gallery—to Manet, whose stiff eponymous sitter Olympia (1863) also lies over elaborate swathes of stark-white bedlinen. ‘Being naked has to do with making a more complete portrait, a naked body is somehow more permanent, more factual’, Freud said. ‘When someone is naked there is in effect nothing to be hidden. Not everyone wants to be that honest about themselves, that means I feel an obligation to be equally honest in how I represent them. It is a matter of responsibility, in a way I don’t want the painting to come from me, I want it to come from them. It can be extraordinary how much you can learn from someone by looking very carefully at them without judgement’ (L. Freud, quoted in press release for Lucian Freud: Monumental, Acquavella Galleries, New York 2019). Kirby, naked and lying on her side, relaxes and sinks into a comfortable position on the mattress. Her fair, translucent limbs bend and wrap around themselves on pale sheets. Her right hand gently presses into a sunken hold while her left clutches beneath the pillow for support. Her body seems to coalesce with her bed, as their soft and malleable forms weigh and impress upon one another’s shapes in equilibrium.
As the months passed, Freud found the work’s end ever more difficult to ascertain. Photographs taken by his assistant David Dawson during these years show that most of the painting was finished by the autumn of 2006. Though for months Kirby suspected each sitting might be her last, Freud prolonged and postponed its completion: ‘just another few weeks’, he would say (L. Freud quoted in M. Gayford, ‘Lucian Freud: marathon man’, The Telegraph, 22 September 2007). On two occasions, the artist enlarged the canvas with near-invisible sewn extensions. William Feaver suggests that Freud’s slow working, involving countless revisions of the face and consecutive sessions spent mixing colours for just a single brushstroke to be added, was a deliberate attempt to delay the ultimate conclusion of their friendship. Kirby’s knees and neck seemed to ‘[harden] into excrescences’, and each area of ‘accretion was being taken to represent, and justify, time spent’ (W. Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame 1968-2011, London 2020, p. 502).
In Ria, Naked Portrait, we witness some 2,400 hours of observation solidify into high impasto relief. The surface terrain—buttery and thick in some areas, coarse and calcified in others—is testament to this remarkably long gestation. The portrait was finally completed in 2007. This same year, Freud was the subject of the acclaimed retrospective, curated by Catherine Lampert, which began at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and toured to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark and the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. Marking the apex of Freud’s dazzling late fame, Ria, Naked Portrait lays bare the enthralling exchange between the painter and his sitter, and is a tour de force of the art historical portrait tradition.