Lucian Freud had a thing for eyes. As if a window to a soul, he would make them large and cartoon-like. And it's these eyes that will first draw your attention in the National Portrait Gallery's spring blockbuster.
Almost everything Freud did had a sense of observational intensity – beyond the things you would normally pick up on at a glance. He once said, "As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does." So he moulded paint into capturing tension, pain, contentment and personality in the most effortless way possible – in the way a person would look when they were daydreaming.
The exhibition is huge and close to capturing 'almost everything' spanning 70 years of his career, from the big eyed portraits in the 1940s to his final unfinished Portrait of the Hound (2011).
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