Lucian Freud’s early obsessions
Freud’s other great love in life, apart from Garman girls, was the animal kingdom and particularly birds. In the years after the war he used to keep a pair of sparrowhawks in the house, which he also drew.
I was always excited by birds. If you touch wild birds it’s a marvellous feeling.To feed them, he would go out shooting rats on the canal bank of Regent’s Park with his Luger. And on trips around Britain he would draw the eerie assortment of dead beasties that washed up on his shore. Puffins. Pigeons. Lobsters. […] The animals, like the people, seem always to have faced up to the ultimate pointlessness of life. It’s Freud’s most chilling pictorial observation. We’re here. We go. That’s it.
