Lucian Freud, Portrait Artist, Dead at 88

The grandson of Sigmund Freud was famous for his nude portraiture

Artist Lucian Freud died on Wednesday night at his home in London after a brief illness, according to The New York Times. The 88-year-old Freud, a grandson of Sigmund Freud, "recast the art of portraiture and offered a new approach to figurative art," according to his Times obituary. "In paintings like "Girl With Roses" (1947-48) and "Girl With a White Dog" (1951-52)," the paper continues, "he put the pictorial language of traditional European painting in the service of an anti-romantic, confrontational style of portraiture that stripped bare the sitter's social facade. Ordinary people--many of them his friends and intimates--stared wide-eyed from the canvas, vulnerable to the artist's ruthless inspection." Reuters offers us a couple examples of Freud's work, including "Pluto and the Bateman Sisters" and a portrait of his daughter Bella: