Drawing for Naked Figure

‘The picture in order to move us must never merely remind us of life, but must acquire a life of its own, precisely in order to reflect life.’
– Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud’s Drawing for Naked Figure, is a tender rendering of Freud’s then-girlfriend Jacquetta Eliot. The outlines of Eliot’s nude body are soft, with Freud layering one next to the other to build tone and resemble the delicacy of a drypoint etching. Pen strokes are alternatively gentle and assured, capturing the talent of the artist’s draughtsmanship – the rise of a shoulder, its form rapidly corrected, the curl of toes trailing into barely-there calligraphy. The composition of Drawing for Naked Figure directly references Freud’s contemporaneous painting, Small Naked Portrait, 1973, now part of the collection of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. For her part, Eliot described the experience of modelling for Freud as ‘fantastically intimate’ (J. Eliot, quoted in W. Feaver, Lucian Freud, New York, 2007, p. 25). In his portraits, Freud nurtured this closeness, seeking out a person’s ‘innermost being’ in his series of naked portraits (R. Lauter, ‘Thoughts on Lucian Freud’, in Lucian Freud: Naked Portraits, exh. cat., Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, 2001, p. 122). In Drawing for Naked Figure, Eliot is vulnerable yet self-possessed, her form alluring, seductive, and insistent.