[The Guardian] Lucian Freud’s love of plants – in pictures

Lucian Freud’s love of plants – in pictures

Lucian Freud may be primarily associated with his unflinching nude portraits, but throughout his career the painter was fascinated with plants. From the zimmerlinde shrubs favoured by his family to the overgrown buddleia in his Notting Hill garden, he spent painstaking hours immortalising weeds and straggly houseplants. “He wasn’t a gardener, he wasn’t a plant lover in a traditional sense,” says art historian Giovanni Aloi, author of Lucian Freud Herbarium and curator of a new exhibition of Freud’s plant portraits. “But he cared about them: he kept them alive, moved them around from studio to studio. He shared his life with them. He approached plants in his work without smothering them with symbolic meaning, so that he could show their real essence – an idea that is visible in all his body of work.”

• Lucian Freud: Plant Portraits is at the, Garden Museum, London SE1 from 14 October to 5 March 2023

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