Lucian Freud: A Great Realist Painter

Girl with Kitten, 1947
By the early 1940s , Freud had begun at last to paint, something he had resisted for years. Portraits and interior scenes for the most part, his first works featured a sharp, tight line that he discovered in the painters of the Northern Renaissance—Albrecht Dürer was a favorite—and a cold, unsparing light.

• Robert Hughes on Modern British Art at the Royal Academy