Fresh out of art college he was set to go to New York when the meeting with Freud turned his head around and threw his own painterly plans onto ice. In between, the life of one of the most important artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is vividly documented - through family photos, in images of the painter in his studio with some of his most celebrated sitters and in portraits by his peers.įew people were as close to Lucian Freud during that time as David Dawson who worked with the artist from 1991 until Freud’s death in 2011, serving as his sitter and aid, and now as the director of the Lucian Freud Archive.ĭavid also co-authored our authoritative, two-volume Lucian Freud book – the most comprehensive publication to date on one of the greatest painters of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – and in 2019, he curated a London exhibition of Freud’s self-portraits, in a show that spanned pretty much the entire breadth of the artist’s career.īut what many people don't know is that David Dawson was a painter himself when he first came upon Freud in the artist's west London studio. Lucian Freud: A Life begins with childhood snapshots and ends with rarely seen photographs of the artist made in his studio in the last weeks of his life. Lucian Freud's former assistant turned Archive Director has been making some rather nice paintings in the Welsh hills these past few months. David Dawson's latest paintings in the Welsh Hills David Dawson's Lockdown Life

Lucian Freud by David Dawson