Bringing together 170 drawings, etchings and paintings, some on display for the first time, the exhibition explores how drawing remained central to one of the 20th century’s greatest figurative painters throughout his career.
Lucian Freud: Drawing Into Painting will run from 12 February – 4 May 2026.
Drawing into Painting will be the UK’s most comprehensive museum exhibition exploring Lucian Freud’s drawings, featuring rarely-seen drawings and preparatory studies alongside iconic paintings, offering an unprecedented insight into the creative process and working methods of one of the greatest realist artists of the twentieth century, Lucian Freud (1922-2011).
Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting is curated by Sarah Howgate, the NPG’s Senior Curator of Contemporary Collections, in collaboration with David Dawson, artist, and Director of the Lucian Freud Archive. The exhibition will explore how, although Freud is best known as a painter, some of the most significant changes in his art can be traced through his drawing. Freud drew obsessively from an early age, and the exhibition’s starting point is the fascinating accumulation of childhood drawings, 48 sketchbooks, letters and unfinished paintings which comprise the Lucian Freud Archive at the National Portrait Gallery. These living, working documents reveal Freud’s thought processes throughout his career, containing not only drawings of different kinds, but also curious details and recurring motifs, telephone numbers ranging from the gas board to the British aristocracy, love-letter drafts, betting tips, and thoughts on paintings. Many drawings featured in the exhibition are previously unseen material from this rich Archive.
Freud’s practice developed into highly finished linear observational drawings in the 1940s, which were much admired by critics at the time. Freud then turned his attention to painting and a looser approach to the medium, in part influenced by his friendship with Francis Bacon. From the mid-1950s to the 1970s, painting was Freud’s main preoccupation, and drawing became a backdrop, a more private activity often played out in sketchbooks. By highlighting drawings in dialogue with paintings, the exhibition demonstrates how Freud used drawing not merely as preparation, but as an essential tool for observation, exploration and understanding his subjects. Freud only returned to drawing in earnest in the mid-1970s when his painting had reached its full maturity. In 1982, after a 34-year hiatus, he returned to etching, which he regarded as a ‘form of drawing’.
Included in Drawing into Painting will be a number of drawings and etchings that have a relationship with specific paintings. The similarities and differences between the mediums are intriguing and provide an interesting insight into the artist’s working process. One of Freud’s most ambitious figure paintings, Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau) (1981–3), was his response to Watteau’s cabinet picture Pierrot Content (c.1712). In a reversal of the conventional artistic process, instead of making preparatory drawings for his painting, Freud made an impressive series of sketches of the completed painting as an aide memoire. Watteau’s painting, Pierrot Content, an important loan from the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid will be displayed alongside Freud’s sketches. As a young man, Freud had attempted to copy Constable’s Study of the Trunk of an Elm Tree (c.1821), but had abandoned it because it was too challenging. He returned to the subject decades later with the etching, After Constable’s Elm (2003), and the Constable painting that inspired him will be displayed alongside the etching.
Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting is accompanied by a publication with the same title, which includes the Curator’s conversations with Bella Freud and David Dawson, and contributions from Colm Tóibín, Catherine Lampert, Tanya Bentley and Isabel Seligman.
“Lucian Freud was one of the greatest observers of the human condition in the twentieth-century. Widely known as a painter, this exhibition interrogates his lesser-known work as a draughtsman. I am excited that Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting brings together the artist’s finest drawings from all over the world, some seen in this exhibition for the first time, and reunites them with the corresponding paintings. This exhibition, taking place in London, the city Freud loved more than any other, reveals a less familiar side of his work, a wonderful opportunity to understand his behind-the-scenes workings and day to day thinking as an artist”
Sarah Howgate
Senior Curator, Contemporary Collections, National Portrait Gallery
The Lead Supporter of Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting is the Huo Family Foundation.
Works in the Lucian Freud Archive were accepted in Lieu of Inheritance Tax by HM Government and allocated to the National Portrait Gallery from the estate of Lucian Freud in 2014 and 2015. Further acquisitions have been generously received from the estate of Lucian Freud.
ENDS
For further press information, images and interview requests please contact: Skye Redman, Press Manager, sredman@npg.org.uk
Notes to editors
Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting
12 February – 3 May 2026
Ground Floor exhibition
Supported by the Huo Family Foundation
Members go free
Following its run at the National Portrait Gallery, Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting will tour to Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, from 10 June – 27 September 2026.
The exhibition publication, Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting (Hardback £40, Paperback £29.95) is available for pre-order from the NPG online shop.
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National Portrait Gallery
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