FREUD, Lucian (1922-2011) - photo 1

FREUD, Lucian (1922-2011)

Lot 89
12.07.2023 00:00UTC +00:00
Classic
Sold
£ 6 300
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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ID 993306
Lot 89 | FREUD, Lucian (1922-2011)
Estimate value
£ 5 000 – 8 000
FREUD, Lucian (1922-2011)

Autograph letter signed (‘Lucian’) to ‘Ade and Peggy’ [Adrian and Peggy Ryan], 20 Delamere Terrace, London, ‘Tuesday’ [8 August 1944].

In English. One page, 248 x 388mm, hand-stencilled ledger paper (tattered top edge with loss to upper-right corner measuring 23mm).



An illustrated letter to Adrian Ryan, a fellow painter whose love affair with Freud remained secret for many years. One of the earliest Lucian Freud letters to be offered at auction, incorporating a sketch of his 1943 lithograph Horse on a Beach. Suggesting he come down to visit on Monday, noting that he would have done so sooner but 'got held up in Dorset and Southwales', Freud asks Ade and Peggy Ryan whether he might bring a friend along to visit them. In characteristically sardonic tone, he advises the couple that his friend ‘wont take up any more room than me or mind primeaval conditions’ and suggests that they could alternatively take residence ‘at a nearby hotel or cave’. He continues in this vein, asking if the Ryans might require ‘any food or anything from Civilisation’. He does, however, offer them a lithograph [Horse on a Beach, 1943], sketching a simplified rendition of a rearing horse and a jumping fish below the body of the text, after noting that he is 'working very hard may have my show in decem'. Freud concludes: ‘Love to both of ye LUCIAN / P. S. if its o.k. ill wire train’.



Adrian Ryan (1920-1998) studied at the Slade School of Art from 1938 to 1939, where his contemporaries included Patrick Heron, Paul Feiler, and Bryan Wynter. Around this time, he met the young Lucian Freud, with whom he had 'a closeness and sexual intimacy which is little known and unexplored’: see ‘Freud, Minton, Ryan - Unholy Trinity’ (2021), an exhibition at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath and Falmouth Art Gallery, which exposed the romantic relationship that Freud and Ryan shared in their youth, facilitated by the painter and illustrator John Minton.



Ryan was the senior of the two, already established in his career when the present letter was written: Freud's rather tentative suggestion that he might send his lithograph seems to suggest an element of self-doubt - uncommon in later years - in offering up his work for critical scrutiny. The friend to whom Freud refers in the letter is Lorna Wishart, the glamorous older woman and then-girlfriend of Laurie Lee, with whom he was romantically entangled: he would go on to marry her niece, Kathleen Epstein, in 1948. Adrian Ryan had in 1940 wed the artist and restorer Peggy Rose (1916-2013), to whom this letter is co-addressed. The present letter is undated, but is sent from 20 Delamere Terrace, the Paddington lodgings which served as Freud's accommodation after he and John Craxton were evicted from 14 Abercorn Place following continued noise complaints. It was written before the date of his first exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery had been agreed: Freud mentions December, but the opening was in fact brought forward to 21 November 1944.

Address of auction CHRISTIE'S
8 King Street, St. James's
SW1Y 6QT London
United Kingdom
Preview
12.07.2023 – 12.07.2023
Phone +44 (0)20 7839 9060
Email
4FQ.AYGKAGLUQ@FO3G@
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Conditions of purchaseConditions of purchase

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