A Major Lucian Freud Exhibition Is Coming To The NPG In 2025
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Here’s everything you need to know about Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting
Last week, London’s National Portrait Gallery displayed its newly acquired Lucian Freud etching plates and prints for the very first time. Set to be displayed until June 2026, they are an amuse bouche of sorts to a major exhibition set to launch at the NPG in February 2026 – the UK’s first museum exhibition to focus on the late great artist’s work on paper. Here’s everything we know so far about Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting.
Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting: All The Details
The news of Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting follows the V&A’s recent Lucian Freud’s Etchings exhibition, which ran from January 2024 to January 2025, and is now on tour at Belfast’s Titanic Experience. That exhibition traces the relationship between Freud and master printer Marc Balakjian, and though Freud’s etchings feature in the NPG’s collection, too, the scope of Drawing into Painting is different.
What To Expect
Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting will kick off the NPG’s 2026 exhibition season with a flourish, delving deep into the artist’s lifelong preoccupation with the human face and figure from the 1930s up to his later works in the early 21st century.
While his best known works are his paintings, Freud mastered drawing in all of its forms, too: pencil, pen, ink, charcoal and etching. Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting will elucidate the dynamic dialogue between the artist’s practice on paper and canvas through a curated selection of paintings, alongside some of the gallery’s newly acquired etchings.
The exhibition will open in early 2026. In the meantime, it’s prime time to see the NPG’s new Freud acquisitions, which are now on display in gallery 26 under the title The Making of an Artist: The Lucian Freud Archive. (The NGP acquired the archive of Lucian Freud from his estate in 2015, with the works on display since the Gallery’s reconfiguration and reopening in 2023.)
A curated selection of the NPG’s 12 new acquisitions from the artist’s estate are now on display here, hoping to demonstrate the famed portraitist’s working practice, including how he often gradually reworked his sitters’ face. NPG archivist Carys Lewis describes the archive as ‘an incredible resource that helps us share unique insights into the artist’s working practice, from his childhood drawings to later sketchbooks’. Other highlights include the artists’ etching tools and two artworks by Freud’s father Ernst, son of Sigmund.
‘Ahead of next year’s major exhibition, which will focus on Freud’s skill as a draughtsman across many mediums, this free archive display in gallery 26 will delve into the ways in which he worked as a printmaker, displaying his tools and trial proofs alongside new etchings – the first to enter the NPG’s Collection,’ Lewis says.
The acquisitions include eight etchings – the first Freud etchings to enter the NPG collection. One such etching is a rare trial proof of the artist’s daughter, Bella Freud, without a face, and another preparatory sketch of the work.
‘My father spent a long time working on Bella in her Pluto T-shirt,’ the fashion designer says. ‘He reworked my face several times before finalising the etching – it was really unusual for that to happen. And it was quite interesting, in a way, to see that not everything came out right, and how to deal with something when it doesn’t. Sometimes he would “scrap” something, as he called it, and then start again. And this time he just didn’t… Eventually, it was good.
‘I think that’s been a very useful lesson in my work and my life,’ Bella adds. ‘You don’t give up: you look for a way to see how things can work and then something will come if you’re in that mindset.’
Freud was full of these nuggets of wisdom. In a recent interview with C&TH, another of Freud’s daughters, Esther, remembered her father as ‘so perceptive’ with ‘a beautiful way of using language’. ‘He always chose his words very carefully, even if it was just a postcard,’ she says.
‘He said: “It’s completely fine to always paint a staircase, as long as you know that you’re always painting a staircase”,’ Esther adds. ‘And while it takes courage to write about the deep, dark things that exist within you or your family, I seem to have that necessary shard of glass, that little bit of grit.’
Where & When?
Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting will run from 12 February to 3 May 2026 at the National Portrait Gallery (St. Martin’s Pl, London WC2H 0HE). Tickets will go on sale in autumn 2025.
