Lucian Freud in his final months... as sculpted by his daughter

13 April 2012

This giant head of Lucian Freud has been produced by one of his daughters from sketches made in the final months before his death.

After being fired in a kiln, the terracotta head will go on show in the museum dedicated to his grandfather, Sigmund, this month.

Jane McAdam Freud, 53, one of four children the artist fathered with the artist Katherine McAdam, scarcely saw her father from the age of eight until she was 31.

But by then Jane, too, was an artist in her own right and they would talk regularly about their work.

She asked if he would sit for her and he promised he would, one day. He was as good as his word in the final months before his death aged 88 last July - even though he was painting virtually to the end himself.

"The last time I saw my father was shortly before his death, when I finished the sketches of him. I've now used them to make this large portrait sculpture. It helps me to keep him alive," said McAdam Freud.

She admitted to have been hugely influenced by him. "He taught me what it meant to really concentrate," she said. McAdam Freud, who lives and works in north-west London, teaches sculpture at Morley College in Lambeth and has work in the British Museum, the V&A and the Ashmolean in Oxford.

The Freud Museum in Hampstead is in the house where Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, lived after his family fled the Nazis in 1938.

The giant head, called EarthStone Triptych, which measures three feet by three feet by one foot, will go on show with other smaller scale work and preparatory sketches.

Lucian Freud, My Father is on show from January 25 to March 4.

Read more at: freud.org.uk

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