Christie’s has announced the sale of three paintings by Lucian Freud, each from the same private collection, in its 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 15 October 2025. The works—Self-portrait Fragment, Woman with a Tulip, and Sleeping Head—chart Freud’s development across three decades, from the precise draftsmanship of the 1940s to the expressive brushwork that would come to define his mature style.
All three have been widely exhibited. They appeared in the artist’s lifetime retrospectives and in the posthumous surveys that have shaped our understanding of his place in post-war painting, including Lucian Freud: New Perspectives, staged at the National Gallery and Madrid’s Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza for his centenary in 2022–23.
Katharine Arnold, Christie’s Vice-Chairman, 20/21, describes the trio as “an arc of technique”: the meticulous handling of Woman with a Tulip (1944); the broader, more searching brushwork of Self-portrait Fragment (c.1956); and the freedom found in Sleeping Head (1961–71). She notes the parallel between stylistic change and shifts in Freud’s personal life, from his relationships with Lorna Wishart, Kitty Garman and Caroline Blackwood to the independence of the 1960s. “Each painting is in some way a reflection of himself,” Arnold says.
Self-portrait Fragment, c.1956
Painted during the breakdown of his marriage to Caroline Blackwood, Self-portrait Fragment is among the rarest of Freud’s self-images and has been in the same private collection for nearly sixty years. It was first exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in 1968, then disappeared from public view for more than four decades, until it resurfaced at Freud’s Vienna retrospective in 2013.
The canvas shows Freud’s features emerging from a field of open space, the head rendered with coarse, loaded brushstrokes. It is larger than life, a study that seems both unfinished and intensely alive. Toby Treves has written that Freud abandoned the picture “as if he had heard the sound of breathing come from the figure on the canvas.”
The painting reveals Freud moving from the fine sable brushes of his early portraits toward a more raw and physical use of paint. Its incompletion links it to a lineage stretching back to Michelangelo and Rodin, artists whose “unfinished” works carried their own authority. It also sits within Freud’s wider dialogue with Francis Bacon, his closest friend at the time. The two exchanged ideas daily in Soho pubs and studios, and their portraits of one another from this period remain defining images of post-war British art.
Woman with a Tulip, 1944
Woman with a Tulip is a landmark of Freud’s early career and his first portrait of Lorna Wishart, one of the celebrated Garman sisters and, in his words, “the first person who meant something to me.” A companion work, Woman with a Daffodil (1945), is held in the collection of MoMA in New York.
Executed on a gessoed panel at the height of the war, the painting presents Wishart frontally, her face paired with the bloom of a tulip, evoking the style of devotional icons. Freud’s attention to detail is absolute: the sitter’s eyes and mouth are fixed with near-miniaturist clarity, while the flower operates as both motif and offering.
The work was shown in his debut solo exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery in 1944 and has since featured in every major survey of his career. It also foreshadows his late-1940s portraits, such as Girl with a Kitten (1947), where the same “involuntary magnification” of features heightens psychological intensity.
Sleeping Head, 1961–71
Painted in Freud’s Delamere Terrace studio in Paddington, Sleeping Head depicts a woman resting on a leather sofa. Broad strokes of light and shadow describe the contours of her face and hair, capturing both stillness and physicality.
The work was begun in 1961 after Freud’s return from Greece and completed over several sittings, with minor revisions extending into the following decade. First shown at Marlborough in 1963, it later appeared in Lucian Freud: Paintings (1987–88), the touring survey that established his international reputation.
The painting marks a decisive shift in Freud’s method. The meticulous line of the 1940s and early ’50s gives way here to painterly freedom, anticipating the monumental nudes that followed. Though intimate in scale, Sleeping Head embodies his belief that “the paint is the person.”
The three works will be exhibited at Christie’s King Street galleries from 8 to 15 October during Frieze Week. Together they map the trajectory of one of the most scrutinised careers in British painting, from youthful exactitude to the searching vitality of his mature art.