Detail of Susie by Lucian Freud in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, June 2010

Susie
1988
Lucian Freud, English, born in 1922

Dimensions: 27.3 x 22.2 cm (10 3/4 x 8 3/4 in.)

Medium or Technique: Oil on canvas

Classification: Paintings

Accession Number: 2003.37

One of the most respected artists working in the figurative tradition today, Lucian Freud painted this intimate portrait of his youngest daughter with the same lavishness found in his masterful, large compositions of naked flesh. The same complexity of gradation of tones found within the artist's larger studies of bared bodies is evident in this life-sized head. The weight of Susie's pensive expression is physically mirrored in the heavily painted surface, which would be incomplete if even one of Freud's ...paint-laden brushstrokes were to be removed. The resulting presence of this intimate painting exceeds it dimensions. It is both frank in description and penetrating in the artist's understanding of his subject while revealing Freud's own intimacy with his materials.

Text from: www.mfa.org/collections/object/susie-354624