Lucian Freud: A Great Realist Painter

Lucian Freud with Zebra Head, circa 1943
The British painter Lucian Freud, who was 88 when he died on July 21, proved with a bang the continuing vitality of the figurative tradition in art. In 1993, Time's then-art critic Robert Hughes, called him "the best realist painter alive". A grandson of Sigmund Freud—his father Ernst was Freud's son—he was born in Berlin but came to England when his family fled Hitler in 1933, later studying art at various British schools. By his teens he was already publishing portrait drawings of British literary celebrities like the essayist Cyril Connoly and the poet Stephen Spender.

• Robert Hughes on Modern British Art at the Royal Academy