William Feaver

Painter, curator, author and art critic William Feaver talks about the first part of his landmark biography of his friend and collaborator the great 20th-century portraitist Lucien Freud.

Feaver made notes of the hundreds of conversations he had with the notoriously private Freud about his life, his art, his loves, and the art world. The first volume of the two-part biography looks at Freud’s early life in a wealthy Jewish family in Weimar Berlin, escape from Nazi Germany and education at an English public school and art school, his time in the Merchant Navy, post-war adventures in Europe and setting up as a painter in Maida Vale. Feaver describes the coming of age of an artist and his rejection of popular styles to create a style of his own.

Feaver is a painter, an author and a curator, including of the 2002 Lucian Freud retrospective at Tate Britain in 2002 and the exhibition of Freud’s drawings in London and New York in 2012. He was art critic of the Observer for 23 years. The Lives of Lucian Freud has been shortlisted for this year’s Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.