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“... use of what is intimate and close-by as subject matter has contemporary resonances (Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud) and historical ones (from Chardin’s studio-bound way of working to Cézanne’s Provençal landscape beat, and the dusty, unchanging workspaces of Giacometti and Morandi). The dedication of life to work suggests that art is a long and difficult ...”

“... scale. How much better about ourselves it makes us feel that our greatest living artist, now that Lucian Freud is dead, is back from California to celebrate an undervisited corner of agricultural East Yorkshire and make it glorious. The exhibition is full of signs of proud Englishness, and of spring and summer; it thumbs its nose at austerity and ...”

“... The Forest at Pontaubert. His preferences trace a line through English art from Gainsborough to Lucian Freud, making a rather pointed detour round the Pre-Raphaelites but spending arguably too long in what he himself called the ‘virtuous fog’ of Bloomsbury, represented here by an Omega dinner service intended to celebrate famous women, badly painted in ...”

“... her own. When you think about what kind of artist she was, putting her child-invaded studio and Lucian Freud’s naked-friend-and-acquaintance-laden chairs and couches side by side suggests a common attitude to work that has nothing to do with style and not much to do with subject. (Eardley did paint one male nude: it shows a friend, Angus Neil, lying on a ...”

“... Bacon will have found that he went unmentioned (not a neo-romantic) and that the reproduction of Lucian Freud’s 1952 portrait of a luminously doleful John Minton made page 74 the one page worth saving. For Bacon, seeing it in 1973, 16 years after Minton’s suicide, this was a painting wreathed in despair. To him John Minton had been the epitome of the ...”

“... painter, he is.There are some early photographs in the catalogue of Andrews with Soho friends like Lucian Freud and Tim Behrens (whose portrait is in the exhibition). Andrews was excited by parties: he looks at once charming and shy. Other painters of his generation impressed their personalities on their time by finding identifiable ways of making ...”

“... detail and, like Wilkie, turned to the profitable business of portraiture. In our time Lucian Freud found the shift from little brushes to big ones a relief. In Wilkie’s case the sheer effort and time which went into one detailed painting may have told, but a look at his early work invites other thoughts. First, just as the late pictures show him ...”

“... do it. Photography has so far subdued the power of painting to embellish personality that when Lucian Freud (who in his prices, subjects and reputation is the closest thing we have to a dominant face-painter of Reynolds’s calibre) paints the Queen (as Reynolds painted the Prince of Wales) or Kate Moss undressed (as Reynolds painted Kitty Fisher), it is ...”

“... Jan van Eyck (The Complete Paintings of the Van Eycks, 1968). Hughes greatly admires, for example, Lucian Freud, who stands prominently on his post-war shortlist of two dozen or so artists. One could forgive the reader of Culture of Complaint for thinking that a remark such as ‘so haunting an erotic tenderness’ (apropos of Girl With Roses, in ...”

“... as C. Eliot Hodgkin’s pictures of plants on London bomb sites, there is a little picture here by Lucian Freud of buddleia, a major coloniser of abandoned buildings and waste ground and the plant most often to be seen in his big pictures of house-backs and overgrown junk seen from a high window.After overgrown gardens the geometry of well-tended rows is the ...”

“... of 1509, seems to us more ‘naked’, and more modern – akin to the work of Schiele or Lucian Freud – than his engraving of a perfectly proportioned Apollonian Adam. The previous iteration of The Renaissance Nude in Los Angeles included a fine example of a late 15th-century Florentine drawing of studio lads in their underwear. It is natural to ...”

“... genres of portrait and nude. To combine these has always been provocative. Goya’s Naked Maja and Lucian Freud’s pictures of nameable naked people take some of their force from the subjects’ unexpected willingness to let themselves be exposed. Stanley Spencer’s portrait of himself and Patricia Preece naked with a leg of lamb, and Dürer’s drawing of ...”

“... subjects and purposes of European painting, is displayed the work produced by Francis Bacon and by Lucian Freud during the same decades – interiors, still-lives, nudes, portraits, in oil paint on canvas. Bacon’s paint, smeared and spattered on a routine flat preparation, suggests the calculated accident – not only chance effects with paint but terrible ...”

“... taught us to laugh in a new manner when he mingled together the anti-Christian Greek satirist Lucian, a Greek-writing St Paul, the earliest major Greek theologian (the controversial Origen) and the only Latin ever placed on the same level, Jerome. How far did Erasmus, with all this Greek and his knowledge of the Fathers, break the mould in which his ...”

“... she acquired the nickname ‘Dirty Nina’ – but she continued to meet artists, including Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, who admired her and her work. Where are these later drawings now? Lost? Sold for a drink or some spare change? Many years before, she had given away drawings by Modigliani and Gaudier-Brzeska, handing them out to strangers at the ...”