Name: Girl Sitting
Brand: Lucian Freud
Rating: 5 (236 reviews)

Track auction value trend

Lucian Freud's Girl Sitting, a signed etching from 1987, is estimated to be worth between £7,000 and £11,000. This artwork has shown consistent value growth, with an auction history of 11 total sales since its entry to the market in May 2008. The hammer price over the past five years has ranged from £11,000 in December 2023 to £18,144 in September 2021. The average annual growth rate of this piece is 8% and it is part of a limited edition of 50.

Meaning & Analysis

This etching was executed by Lucian Freud in 1987 during a fruitful period of printmaking. As the title of the work would suggest, Freud depicts a nude woman sitting on the floor with her back apparently slumped against a wall. Typical of his innovative use of composition, the seated body of the sitter is spread across the top of the composition, cropping the top of her head out of the frame and leaving the bottom of the work empty. Freud's viewpoint, slightly from above, provides emphasis on her slumping figure and draws attention to her stern gaze.

Though the identity of this unnamed sitter is unknown, we can observe in Girl Sitting an intimate bond between sitter and artist so typical of Freud's work. Renowned for his risqué love-life, the sitter might have been one of Freud's many lovers who sat for him in the studio.

In his handling of composition, this work is not dissimilar to another of Freud's Naked Portraits: Girl Holding Her Foot. Though Freud has depicted these figures in seemingly odd places, and left their backgrounds unmarked, his masterful tonality gives weight to their nudes bodies. In many works from our Naked Portraits collection of his work, Freud focuses on the curvature of women's bodies, challenging demanding beauty standards and the expectations of women's bodies in popular culture.