January 2009

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In the summer of 1943, the 21-year-old Lucian Freud sent a postcard from Scotland to his friend the fabric designer Elsie Nicholson. He wrote in his wobbly script, ‘I am staying at a really hot stuff tip-top hop-scotch luxury dive for old dames. And the country! Its really a fit subject for a new Fitzpatrick the voice of the Globe traveltalk films in technicolour. Very spectacular and exiting beautiful when its sunny.’

On its own, the card is a nice example of Freud’s spiky writing style and its youthful humour. He seemed to like sending comic postcards – this one features an elephant which has a mirror for a head, under which is a line of text that reads: ‘Pack up your trunk and come here for a bit.’ This was the same summer that Freud made the extraordinary drawing Loch Ness from Drumnadrochit (1943; Fig. 1), which forms part of this excellently selected and researched exhibition at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, London, of Freud’s drawings and paintings dating from 1940-58. Drawn with pen and ink from the window at the Drumnadrochit Hotel, it has not had the attention it deserves. It is an astonishing piece of drawing – the foreground grass is composed of commas and cone shapes, while in the middle ground, surrounding the delicately drawn boulders, the space is filled in with little spirals, circles filled in with dots, and tiny spider-like forms.

This much we knew, but what is more, as the postcard reveals, is that he was viewing this sunny landscape through a cinematic filter. The ‘Fitzpatrick’ he mentions is the American documentary film-maker James Fitzpatrick, who was well known for his series of Technicolour films ‘Fitzpatrick Traveltalks’. These included such titles as Yosemite the Magnificent (1941) and Alluring Alaska (1941), and featured lingering panoramic shots in grand landscapes. This helps to explain the alluring awkwardness and heightened intensity of Freud’s drawing – elements that permeate many of the works on show.

Some have regarded this early period as immature (John Piper dismissed the works as ‘youthful mannerisms’) and even Freud has said that his Welsh drawings from 1940 are ‘rather perverse...from a very distant self’, although his idiosyncratic personality and veiled warmth is apparent from the start. In a portrait of Stephen Spender (1940), the earliest piece here, and shown for the first time, you immediately sense that despite Freud’s shaky line and the oddly extenuated facial features, he is already in control.

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