Lucian Freud

During the first winter of World War II, Lucian Freud, age seventeen, traveled with his art school friend David Kentish to Capel Curig, North Wales, to spend three
months painting and drawing in relative isolation. The two young artists, joined by the poet Stephen Spender (English, 1909–1995), then thirty-one and recently
estranged from his wife, spent evenings talking, drawing, and writing by lamplight. This is one of several of Freud’s drawings of Spender in which the poet’s eyes are cast down, suggesting he was reading or writing while sitting for the portrait. The drawing’s tautness of line and intensity of expression presage Freud’s mature work.