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Jul/Aug

Museum

An Artist’s Life: Photographs
of Lucian Freud by
Cecil Beaton and David Dawson

Sotheby’s - London
10 July -11 August

WIND BACK the New Bond Street clock to one summer in the 1950s. From the galleries which stand silent and empty of artworks until October, we catch the distinct sounds of a cricket game in progress in the Long Gallery. From the knock of the gavel to the thud of a bat: the galleries’ Summer ‘return to pasture’ had been imaginatively put to use by Sotheby’s employees. Come 2012 and the bucolic memory of one summer is replaced by anticipation of a quite a different summer. This Olympic year Sotheby’s prepares for a sequence of dazzling exhibitions to extend from 10 July until the day before Games’ closing ceremony.

This beautifully curated exhibition of portrait photographs draws an elegiac full circle through the artist’s life and career. In a rare opportunity to view photographs from the historic Beaton archive, Cecil Beaton’s early Freud stands in first-time dialogue with David Dawson’s images of the artist in later years.

Dawson sat for Freud over a period of 20 years, including for the final Portrait of the Hound: his photographs add further dimension to the relationship of sitter and artist. The show will be an unmissable epilogue to an historic Freud season.

A selection of limited edition prints are available to purchase at the exhibition.