Portrait of Hermione Scott, 1961
Oil on canvas
35.6cm x 35.6 cm
Lucian Freud was one of the most important British artists of the 20th century. This painting, along with a companion piece, Portrait of Lady Scott (also in the Abbot Hall collection), are unusual in that they were the result of a direct commission by Sir Oliver and Lady Scott – Freud rarely accepted such portrait assignments.
Freud was born in Berlin, the son of a Jewish architect and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. Having moved to Britain in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism, Freud became a British citizen in 1939 and studied art at Cedric Morris’ East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham. He was given his first solo exhibition five years later. Throughout his career as an artist, Freud’s subjects were often the people in his life: family, children, friends, lovers and fellow painters. Freud strove to capture his sitters ‘not because of what they were like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be’.
The sitter in this work is the daughter of Sir Oliver and Lady Scott, Hermione. It is reported that Freud undertook this second commission in exchange for the settling of some debts by Sir Oliver. Sir Oliver Scott (1922–2016) was a distinguished philanthropist and radiobiologist whose research contributed to the treatment of cancer. His family have a longstanding connection with the Lake District, having founded the Provincial Insurance Company in Kendal in around 1900.
Commissioned from the artist by Sir Oliver and Lady Scott, 1961.
Accepted in lieu of tax by HM Government and allocated to Lakeland Arts, 2017.
In more detail...
- Loose brush work
In 1958, Freud switched from fine sable brushes to coarser brushes made from hog hair. Painted three years later, this work, with its free brush strokes and warmer flesh tones, marks the maturity of Freud’s more expressive, naturalistic approach to painting after the stylised portraits of the 1940s and 50s.
- Looking down
From the mid-1950s, Freud started painting from a standing position while in close proximity to his sitters; many of his subsequent portraits, including this one, adopt an unsettling high-angled viewpoint. Hermione Scott would have been about nine years old at the time that Freud painted her and was only subjected to two sittings.
