Lucian Freud drawings to go under the hammer

Many of the articles that are now coming out in anticipation of the National Portrait Gallery’s Lucian Freud exhibition next month mention the record 17.2 million that Roman Abramovich paid for the fleshy life-size portrait Benefits Supervisor Sleeping. That painting, which will be in the exhibition, made Freud the most expensive living artist in the world.

But what about his coloured chalk drawing Beach Scene with a Boat? An early work from 1945, less than 2ft square, it sold last June from the Evill Frost collection, a month before the artist’s death, for 2.6 million. This was not only a record for a work on paper by Freud, but probably a record for a drawing by a living artist. I can’t think of many modern artists other than Picasso, Matisse, or Schiele, whose drawings have sold for more.

The thought is all the more remarkable considering that Freud virtually gave up drawing in the Fifties to build his reputation as an oil painter using thicker brushes and brush strokes. His early paintings – meticulously neat, linear, and a cross between surreal neo-Romanticism and the decadent realism of George Grosz or Otto Dix – were too reliant on his drawings for his liking. And they were outnumbered. “I would have thought that I did 200 drawings to every painting in those early days,” he said of his teenage years. But still, he added, “I very much prided myself on my drawing.”

As an adjunct to the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition, with its emphasis on the post-Fifties oil paintings, there will be an exhibition entirely devoted to Freud’s drawings at the Blain/Southern gallery in Dering Street. Here, more than 100 drawings curated by Freud’s biographer, William Feaver, will show the full range of his activity, from sketch-book doodles to fully worked colour drawings dating from the Thirties, through the Sixties when he flirted briefly with watercolour washes, to the Eighties when he was concentrating mostly on etching as a form of drawing.

Arranged with Freud’s dealer since the Nineties, Acquavella of New York, the drawings are not officially for sale, though works recently on the market in the show will give an idea of current values. From the Evill Frost sale comes Boy on a Sofa, 1944, which sold for 1.5 million. Two equally early works from Kay Saatchi’s collection that were sold last summer are included – Dead Bird, which was bought by Acquavella for 481,250, and Sleeping Cat, sold to master drawings dealer Stephen Ongpin for 193,250. It is a measure of the change in the Freud drawings market that when this drawing was offered at auction in 1997, with a 15,000 estimate, it was unsold.

However, it often happens that, after high prices at auction, lesser work by an artist, in spite of its historical interest, tends to be overvalued. Four slight Freud drawings from the Forties were offered by Christie’s in November, but the 25,000 to 60,000 estimates were considered too inflated and they were unsold.

So it will be interesting to see if Sotheby’s and Christie’s have got their estimates right when they offer Freud drawings in their contemporary art sales next month. Christie’s has a previously unrecorded Irish landscape from 1948 (200,000 to 300,000), while Sotheby’s has five works from a single collection, thought to be that of Freud’s former dealer, James Kirkman.