Lucian Freud Painting He Spent Decades Denying Will Go on Public View for the First Time
A painting Lucian Freud long denied making, Man in a Black Scarf, will go on public view for the first time in the exhibition “Benton End: A Paradise of Pollen and Paint” at London’s Garden Museum. Freud is believed to have painted the portrait in 1939 while studying at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Hadleigh, Suffolk, and the sitter is thought to be John Jameson, heir to the Jameson whiskey family. Christie’s cataloged the work as a Freud in 1985 but changed course after Freud rejected the attribution, and the dispute persisted for decades, gaining renewed attention on the BBC’s Fake or Fortune? in 2016 when art historian Philip Mould said it was probably genuine. In 2018, researchers in the Tate Britain archives found student records indicating Freud was painting a portrait of John Jameson in 1939, evidence that helped support the attribution and led to the work’s inclusion in the upcoming show about Benton End and the school run by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines.
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This story was covered in Protests, Lawsuits, and the Art Market’s Secrets