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Lot Essay
Held in the same private collection since its execution in 2008, Mark the Collector is a superb late portrait by one of the past century’s most revered painters. It depicts a prominent American property developer and collector of Old Master paintings, Mark Fisch, who travelled from New York for ten days each month across 2007-2008 to sit for Lucian Freud at his Kensington Church Gardens studio in London. Freud’s virtuosic command of paint was undiminished in his later years, and in this intimate depiction of Fisch’s face the artist revels in the prismatic polyphony of flesh. Warm ochre and umber strokes are balanced by areas of shadow delineated in cool purple and green tones, and brilliant highlights in pale Naples yellow and the artist’s favoured Cremnitz white. A masterful fleck of bold blue near the sitter’s hairline completes the painter’s palette.
As Fisch began sitting for Freud in 2007, the artist was at the height of his critical and popular acclaim. Major retrospectives of his career went on view that year at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Freud would soon begin working towards his culminating museum presentations at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and, opening just months after he passed away in 2011, at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Adopting a tightly cropped composition, the present work recalls two plaster masks illustrated in J.H. Breasted’s Geschichte Ägyptens (1936). Freud greatly admired this book, particularly its illustrations of plaster heads, which he reproduced in the early 1990s in two paintings and an etching. One of the faces is believed to depict the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep III, grandfather of Tutankhamun. The immediacy of the portrait resonated acutely with Freud, who identified in its poetic, quiet dignity the truest qualities of kingship. He adopted this compositional approach across several important portrait heads throughout his career, including those of family, nobility, friends and fellow artists. In the present work Fisch is similarly unadorned, wearing a simple, crisp white shirt. Freud elects to exclude any indicators of status or wealth in favour of a penetrating portrait which seems to capture the sitter’s intrinsic essence as much as his outward appearance.
On one occasion while sitting for Freud, Fisch brought with him a small, exquisite Rembrandt from his collection for the painter to study: Abraham Serving the Three Angels (1646). Freud shared his sitter’s profound admiration for the Old Masters and adorned the walls of his home with paintings by Corot, Constable, Degas, Rodin and Cézanne. In 1989, as part of a series of exhibitions titled The Artist’s Eye, he was asked by the National Gallery, London, to curate a selection of works from their collection to be hung alongside his own, for which he chose paintings by Ingres, Velázquez, Constable, Turner and Rembrandt, amongst others. Freud’s paintings continued to be exhibited alongside those of the Old Masters throughout his career, including at the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Wallace Collection, London, in 1994 and 2004 respectively. On occasion he paid direct homage to artists such as Chardin, Watteau or Constable in his own work. Above all he held a profound love of Titian, whose paintings he saw as ‘intimate, yet also grand’ and ‘so full of light, and air’ (L. Freud quoted in X. Salomon, ‘Lucian Freud and Titian: “A little bit of poison”’, in Lucian Freud, exh. cat. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna 2013, p. 69). In the present work, Freud achieves a strikingly similar effect.
The art historian Xavier F. Salomon has compared Freud’s painting of Mark Fisch to Titan’s portrait of the art and antique collector Jacopo Strada (circa 1567-1568), held in the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. In that painting, Titian depicts his sitter with the accoutrements of his trade; Strada is lavishly cloaked in gold and fur, surrounded by several of his prized possessions. Conversely nothing in Freud’s painting, beyond its title, identifies Fisch as a collector. The understated composition strives rather towards the essence of art collecting, a richly psychological study of the transaction between painter and sitter. Salomon suggests that the exchange captures ‘a perceptive game between two observers: the artist observing and recording the sitter, who is observing him in return. The painter portrays the collector. The collector collects the painting itself, and through it the act of sitting for the painter and the experience connected to it’ (X. Salomon, ibid.).
Fisch encountered Freud’s work in 1996, at the artist’s first exhibition at William Acquavella’s New York gallery. Acquavella would represent Freud across his final two decades and was pivotal in expanding his profile beyond Britain. His gallery, then on East 79th Street near to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, had previously been the premises of the preeminent transatlantic art dealer Joseph Duveen. A century before Fisch first saw Freud’s paintings, from those same galleries Duveen had sold masterpieces of European art to such titans of American industry as J.P. Morgan, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon. Mark the Collector thus represents a continuation of the historic networks of commerce and artistic exchange across the Atlantic. Fisch later recalled that during one of his sittings, Freud admitted ‘the most terrifying thing in a day is painting’ (M. Fisch quoted in C. Lampert and T. Treves, Lucian Freud: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, London 2025, p. 306). As the present work attests, Freud restlessly, compulsively continued to face this ‘terrifying thing’ into his final years, with extraordinary consequences. Fisch’s profile, steady and assured, emerges from a tangle of thick impasto daubs. As Freud studies the modern collector, Fisch in turn holds his gaze, appraising one of the greatest painters of his time.
As Fisch began sitting for Freud in 2007, the artist was at the height of his critical and popular acclaim. Major retrospectives of his career went on view that year at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Freud would soon begin working towards his culminating museum presentations at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and, opening just months after he passed away in 2011, at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Adopting a tightly cropped composition, the present work recalls two plaster masks illustrated in J.H. Breasted’s Geschichte Ägyptens (1936). Freud greatly admired this book, particularly its illustrations of plaster heads, which he reproduced in the early 1990s in two paintings and an etching. One of the faces is believed to depict the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep III, grandfather of Tutankhamun. The immediacy of the portrait resonated acutely with Freud, who identified in its poetic, quiet dignity the truest qualities of kingship. He adopted this compositional approach across several important portrait heads throughout his career, including those of family, nobility, friends and fellow artists. In the present work Fisch is similarly unadorned, wearing a simple, crisp white shirt. Freud elects to exclude any indicators of status or wealth in favour of a penetrating portrait which seems to capture the sitter’s intrinsic essence as much as his outward appearance.
On one occasion while sitting for Freud, Fisch brought with him a small, exquisite Rembrandt from his collection for the painter to study: Abraham Serving the Three Angels (1646). Freud shared his sitter’s profound admiration for the Old Masters and adorned the walls of his home with paintings by Corot, Constable, Degas, Rodin and Cézanne. In 1989, as part of a series of exhibitions titled The Artist’s Eye, he was asked by the National Gallery, London, to curate a selection of works from their collection to be hung alongside his own, for which he chose paintings by Ingres, Velázquez, Constable, Turner and Rembrandt, amongst others. Freud’s paintings continued to be exhibited alongside those of the Old Masters throughout his career, including at the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Wallace Collection, London, in 1994 and 2004 respectively. On occasion he paid direct homage to artists such as Chardin, Watteau or Constable in his own work. Above all he held a profound love of Titian, whose paintings he saw as ‘intimate, yet also grand’ and ‘so full of light, and air’ (L. Freud quoted in X. Salomon, ‘Lucian Freud and Titian: “A little bit of poison”’, in Lucian Freud, exh. cat. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna 2013, p. 69). In the present work, Freud achieves a strikingly similar effect.
The art historian Xavier F. Salomon has compared Freud’s painting of Mark Fisch to Titan’s portrait of the art and antique collector Jacopo Strada (circa 1567-1568), held in the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. In that painting, Titian depicts his sitter with the accoutrements of his trade; Strada is lavishly cloaked in gold and fur, surrounded by several of his prized possessions. Conversely nothing in Freud’s painting, beyond its title, identifies Fisch as a collector. The understated composition strives rather towards the essence of art collecting, a richly psychological study of the transaction between painter and sitter. Salomon suggests that the exchange captures ‘a perceptive game between two observers: the artist observing and recording the sitter, who is observing him in return. The painter portrays the collector. The collector collects the painting itself, and through it the act of sitting for the painter and the experience connected to it’ (X. Salomon, ibid.).
Fisch encountered Freud’s work in 1996, at the artist’s first exhibition at William Acquavella’s New York gallery. Acquavella would represent Freud across his final two decades and was pivotal in expanding his profile beyond Britain. His gallery, then on East 79th Street near to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, had previously been the premises of the preeminent transatlantic art dealer Joseph Duveen. A century before Fisch first saw Freud’s paintings, from those same galleries Duveen had sold masterpieces of European art to such titans of American industry as J.P. Morgan, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon. Mark the Collector thus represents a continuation of the historic networks of commerce and artistic exchange across the Atlantic. Fisch later recalled that during one of his sittings, Freud admitted ‘the most terrifying thing in a day is painting’ (M. Fisch quoted in C. Lampert and T. Treves, Lucian Freud: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, London 2025, p. 306). As the present work attests, Freud restlessly, compulsively continued to face this ‘terrifying thing’ into his final years, with extraordinary consequences. Fisch’s profile, steady and assured, emerges from a tangle of thick impasto daubs. As Freud studies the modern collector, Fisch in turn holds his gaze, appraising one of the greatest painters of his time.