Lucian Freud’s Portrait of his Friend, Famed Restaurateur and Hotelier Jeremy King  To Make Auction Debut in London this October

Jeremy King in Lucian Freud’s studio with ‘Head of Jeremy King’

© David Dawson. All rights reserved 2022 / Bridgeman Images

Jeremy King said: “From the moment Lucian started coming into The Caprice in the 80s, he was always very much part of my world, but it was not until the opening of The Wolseley in 2003, that I really got to know him. It was a place he would adopt as his home over the next eight years, and he became, over time, the only person I would sit with in the restaurant except my immediate family. He would come up to six, sometimes seven times a week for dinner, often post-sittings, usually with a model, but never could I have dreamt that I would become one of them.

I ended up sitting for him across five years in total, first for a painting and then for the etching, typically sitting two mornings a week, and nearly always going out for breakfast too. I think we were drawn together because we were both quite solo people, both great observers, and there was no better place to watch the world go by than the grand café that was The Wolseley. We would enjoy our time together talking about our families, his peers, the past, or by singing, or saying nothing at all. He was one of the most honest people I have ever met, and the time I was lucky enough to spend with him enriched my life completely.”

Sotheby’s London, 28 September 2022: Famed restaurateur and hotelier Jeremy King OBE welcomed many artists into his restaurants over the decades, but perhaps greatest of all was Lucian Freud.

The duo first met in 1981 at Le Caprice, a restaurant King had taken on at the age of just 26, and which would acquire a reputation as a clubhouse for creatives, with Freud often frequenting in the company of Francis Bacon. They would cross paths again at The Ivy, acquired by King in 1990, a favored haunt of London’s YBAs whose works went on to adorn its walls, but it was at The Wolseley, the grand café redolent of the great European coffee houses opened by King in 2003, that the pair would establish a friendship which would last for the rest of the artist’s life.

For the next eight years, Freud would choose to eat almost every night at The Wolseley, and ultimately invite King, London’s greatest restaurateur who he had been quietly observing from the corners of his restaurants over the past thirty years, to sit for him – first for a painting from 2006 to 2007, and then later for an etching in from 2008 to 2011, which would become one of Freud’s final works.

Indeed, Head of Jeremy King was one of just a very small handful of artworks still in process in Freud’s studio at the time of his death in 2011. Freud would continue to make final touches to the etching’s copper plate into his final days, inviting King into his Kensington studio for two mornings a week as he had done over 100 times across the past three years.

While the portrait appeared to be finished, Freud – in a final artistic act – drew a single chalk line across the background, which he never had a chance to scratch into the surface, ultimately rendering the work technically incomplete at the time his death in 2011. It was decided that the copper plate should never be “pulled” into an etching as all of Freud’s other copper plates were, but instead left as a singular artwork in its own right for perpetuity and remain the only record of Freud’s intended work.

A very rare offering on the market, the copper plate – the first by Freud to ever be offered at auction – will now be offered at Sotheby’s directly from Jeremy King’s own collection on October 15th 2022.

Oliver Barker, Sotheby’s Chairman of Europe, said: This portrait brings together two absolute masters of their respective arts. Freud was a social commentator as much as an artist, and it was not lost on him that King’s restaurants were the ultimate melting pots of their time, with King – the conductor at the centre of it all – being a natural subject for one of his portraits. While in the restaurant world it is often the chefs who receive the plaudits, there can be few restaurateurs or hoteliers who have been met with greater acclaim than Jeremy King.

The portrait to be offered at Sotheby’s is a wholly personal work, one that speaks to an enduring friendship and a meeting of minds. Freud’s determination to continue preparing this portrait until his final days was as much a statement of his intent to remain a working artist until the very end, as it was a reflection of his wish to continue spending valuable time with his friend. While we will never know what Freud’s intended printed etching would have looked like, this luminous copper plate, replete with the artist’s meticulous scratches and chalk marks – laboured over for three years – is an artistic triumph in its own right, and marks the culmination of Freud’s extraordinary seven-decade long career.”

Lucian Freud, Head of Jeremy King (2011), copper plate, 78.8 by 64.2 cm

Est. £250,000-350,000

Lucian Freud at The Wolseley

In his final years, Freud would dine at The Wolseley almost every night – a half-pint of Atlantic prawns or moules et frites becoming his staple orders, served with his own wine (often Château Mouton Rothschild) stocked in the restaurant’s cellars. For Freud, The Wolseley’s classic art deco style evoked old Europe, the Viennese grand cafés he remembered from his childhood and the Parisian brasseries he frequented in the 1950s. There were also few better places in London to watch the city go by.

Freud would often dine post-sittings and in the company of his subjects –  Leigh Bowery, Kate Moss, David Hockney, Martin Gayford and Frank Auerbach to name but a few – affording him an opportunity for further informal observations of his sitter. In his own words: “After a sitting I like to join as far as possible in the feelings and emotions of my models. In a way, I don’t want the picture to come from me, I want it to come from them.”

In time, Freud turned his artistic attention from the models and artists of his day, to the proprietors of the London haunts that formed the backdrop to his daily life, first painting Jeremy King of The Wolseley, and then, in 2008, Sally Clarke of Clarke’s, the restaurant where he would take breakfast and lunch for fifteen years, often with King in tow.

The night after Freud died, a black tablecloth was placed over his corner table at The Wolseley with a single candle burning in his memory. An ice cream dessert was later named in his honour, “Coupe Lucian”.