"I have to start by confessing a heresy - I am not that keen on the artist's work. He's rightly lauded as one of the UK's greatest modern portrait artists, and I can stand back and admire the skill in the paintings. I just find them plain bloody ugly. Not ugly because they are raw and uncompromising, as I quite admire that, but often they seem almost caricatures of ugliness, as if he wanted to exaggerate rather than represent the fragility of human existence."
"His sketches show how it started, with a curious obsession with exaggerated foreheads and lips. Lots of sketches of friends, and some selfies, all exaggerating and looking distinctly as if everyone is suffering from variants of Habsburg Jaw. It must be a quirk, as the handful of sketches of plants on display are picture portraits of what you expect from a botanical sketch. But he turns to humans, and ugh!"
"Although the gallery notes that some of the works on display are from private collections and are rarely seen, the exhibition can almost feel familiar. There are famous paintings dotted around the rooms, and if you've been to any of the seemingly endless Lucian Freud exhibitions in recent years, you've probably seen some of this exhibition already. That's probably the weakness in the exhibition, that for all the talk about a rare chance to see the sketches, they've somewhat padded it out."
National Portrait Gallery display draws from Lucian Freud archive to foreground lesser-known sketches and argue for his skill as a draughtsman beyond oil painting. The sketches reveal early tendencies toward exaggerated foreheads, lips and distorted features in portraits of friends and selfies, often evoking Habsburg-type jaws. A few botanical sketches show expected botanical accuracy. Several famous paintings are included, making the presentation feel familiar and padded despite the promise of rare sketches. The paintings are visually compelling, reducing the necessity of including them in a show ostensibly focused on drawings.
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