Lucian Freud, British painter and draughtsman, 1922-2011

Specialising in figurative art, Lucian Freud, the grandson of Sigmund Freud, is known as one of the foremost 20th-century portraitists. His family escaped the rise of Nazism from Berlin to England in 1933. His early career as a painter was influenced by surrealism, but by the early 1950s his often stark and alienated paintings tended towards realism. He was an intensely private and guarded man, and his paintings are mostly of friends and family. They are generally sombre and thickly impastoed, often set in unsettling interiors and urban landscapes. The works are noted for their psychological penetration and often discomforting examination of the relationship between artist and model.