BRITISH portrait artist Lucian Freud has died at the age of 88.

The realist painter, who was a grandson of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and elder brother to the late broadcaster and politician Sir Clement Freud, died at his home in London on Wednesday night following a short illness.

Freud was born in Berlin in 1922 and came to Britain with his family in 1933, aged 10, to escape the rise of Nazism. He became a British citizen in 1939, and went on to study painting at the Central School of Art in London and Cedric Morris’s East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing.

He was part of a group of artists known as “The School of London”, a loose collection of individual artists working in the capital around the same period in the mid-70s, spearheaded by Freud along with Francis Bacon and others, including German-born Briton Frank Auerbach and American Ronald Kitaj.

New York art dealer William Acquavella described Freud last night as “one of the great painters of the 20th century”.

  • See tomorrow’s Herald for an obituary on the life of Lucian Freud