Newly Confirmed Lucian Freud Debuts in London

Art & Exhibitions Newly Confirmed Lucian Freud Debuts in London The work's 2018 attribution concluded a decades-long struggle. The work's 2018 attribution concluded a decades-long struggle. Vittoria Benzine ShareShare This Article A long-contested, finally confirmed portrait by British painter Lucian Freud went on view to the public for the first time ever this week amidst “Benton End: A Paradise of Pollen and Paint”, at London’s Garden Museum. The exhibition honors the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing—the bohemian art academy that British artist and plantsman Cedric Morris opened in 1937 alongside his life partner, British painter and sculptor Arthur Lett-Haines, in Dedham, Essex. Freud enrolled at the school in 1939, aged just 17. The school burned down that summer, and rumor has it that the blaze was caused by the artist’s carelessness with a cigarette. Morris and Lett opened its second location at Benton End in Hadleigh, Suffolk later that year. The grounds went on to become a fertile oasis, enriched by the innovative green thumbs of Morris and his pupils, including pioneering British garden designer Beth Chatto. In 2021, Pinchbeck Charitable Trust gifted Benton End to the Garden Museum, which is restoring the site. In the meantime, “Benton End: A Paradise of Pollen and Paint” immerses guests in the East Anglian School’s renowned second home. Theater set designer Jeremy Hebert has recreated the school’s kitchen and dining room. The latter features Morris’s actual table and chairs. Accompanying these scenes will be works and ephemera from six Benton End legends—Morris, Lett, Chatto, and Freud, as well as Scottish painter Joan Warburton and British writer and chef Elizabeth David. The new Freud painting, Man in a Black Scarf (1939), will appear amongst a selection of works by the artist which demonstrate how his three formative years at the East Anglian School shaped him. Creative director Jon Lys Turner inherited Man in a Black Scarf from two of Freud’s classmates—British landscape artist Denis Wirth-Miller and his partner, British illustrator Richard Chopping. Wirth-Miller and Chopping both hated Freud. The feeling was mutual. When Wirth-Miller gave Man in a Black Scarf to Turner in 1997 he allegedly declared, “I want it sold as loudly as possible to really upset Lucian.” Freud was notoriously protective of his oeuvre as it was—going to great, possibly illegal lengths to destroy pieces he deemed inferior. His feud with Wirth-Miller and Chopping only exacerbated the matte. When Christie’s accepted Man in a Black Scarf for a 1985 auction, for instance, Freud insisted he hadn’t made it. That claim proved hard to shake. In 2016, the BBC1 television show Fake or Fortune vouched for the authenticity of Turner’s Freud. Conclusive proof only arose, though, two years later, when Lett’s East Anglian School Attendance Register turned up in the Cedric Morris Archive at the Tate. That document indicated that John Jameson (of the famed whiskey family) had modeled for a portraiture class that Freud attended in October 1939, “which provided the deciding evidence needed to attribute the work to Freud following years of uncertainty,” the Garden Museum explained in press materials. The work will make its public debut alongside other relevant Freud relics, like a sketch that Warburton made of him in 1939, and his copy of David’s 1984 book An Omelette and a Glass of Wine. “Benton End: A Paradise of Pollen and Paint” is on view at the Garden Museum, Lambeth Palace Road, London, though September 20, 2026. Article topics