Lucian (Λουκιανός)
A 17th century fictional portrait of Lucian of Samosata
Born	ca. 125 AD Samosata, Roman Empire (nowadays Turkey)
Died	after 180 AD probably Athens
Occupation	Novelist, rhetorician
Notable work(s)	True History, Dialogues of the Dead, Dialogues of the Gods, Dialogues of the Courtesans, Alexander the False Prophet, Sale of Creeds, Philopseudes (which includes The Sorcerer's Apprentice)
Influences Homer, Socrates, Plato, Menander, Menippus, Demonax, Epicurus
Influenced Apuleius, Desiderius Erasmus, Gil Vicente, Baltasar Gracián, Shakespeare, Laurence Sterne, Voltaire, Goethe, Leopardi

Lucian of Samosata (Ancient Greek: Λουκιανὸς ὁ Σαμοσατεύς, Latin: Lucianus Samosatensis; c. AD 125 – after AD 180) was a rhetorician^[1] and satirist who wrote in the Greek language. He is noted for his witty and scoffing nature. Although he wrote solely in Greek, he was ethnically Assyrian.^[2][3][4]

Biography[link]

Few details of Lucian's life can be verified with any degree of accuracy. He claimed to have been born in Samosata, in the former kingdom of Commagene, which had been absorbed by the Roman Empire and made part of the province of Syria. In his works, Lucian refers to himself as a "Syrian",^[5] and "barbarian", perhaps indicating "he was from the Semitic and not the imported Greek population" of Samosata.^[6] Lucian almost certainly did not write all of the more than eighty works attributed to him — declamations, essays both laudatory and sarcastic, satiric epigrams, and comic dialogues and symposia with a satirical cast, studded with quotations in alarming contexts and allusions set in an unusual light, designed to be surprising and provocative. His name added luster to any entertaining and sarcastic essay: over 150 surviving manuscripts attest to his continued popularity. The first printed edition of a selection of his works was issued at Florence in 1499. His best known works are A True Story (a romance, patently not "true" at all, which he admits in his introduction to the story), and Dialogues of the Gods (Θεῶν διάλογοι) and Dialogues of the Dead (Νεκρικοί Διάλογοι).

Lucian was trained as a rhetorician, a vocation where one pleads in court, composing pleas for others, and teaching the art of pleading. Lucian's practice was to travel about, giving amusing discourses and witty lectures improvised on the spot, somewhat as a rhapsode had done in declaiming poetry at an earlier period. In this way Lucian travelled through Ionia and mainland Greece, to Italy and even to Gaul, and won much wealth and fame.

Lucian admired the works of Epicurus, for he breaks off a witty satire against Alexander of Abonoteichus, who burned a book of Epicurus, to exclaim:

What blessings that book creates for its readers and what peace, tranquillity, and freedom it engenders in them, liberating them as it does from terrors and apparitions and portents, from vain hopes and extravagant cravings, developing in them intelligence and truth, and truly purifying their understanding, not with torches and squills and that sort of foolery, but with straight thinking, truthfulness and frankness.

Works[link]

Lucian was also one of the earliest novelists in Western civilization. In A True Story, a fictional narrative work written in prose, he parodied some fantastic tales told by Homer in the Odyssey and some feeble fantasies that were popular in his time. He anticipated "modern" fictional themes like voyages to the moon and Venus, extraterrestrial life and wars between planets, nearly two millennia before Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. His novel is widely regarded as an early, if not the earliest science fiction work.^{[7][8][9][10][11]}

Lucian also wrote a satire called The Passing of Peregrinus,^[12] in which the lead character, Peregrinus Proteus, takes advantage of the generosity and gullibility of Christians. This is one of the earliest surviving pagan perceptions of Christianity. His Philopseudes (Φιλοψευδὴς ἤ Ἀπιστῶν, "Lover of Lies or Cheater") is a frame story which includes the original version of The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

In his Symposium (Συμπόσιον), far from Plato's discourse, the diners get drunk, tell smutty tales and behave badly.

The Macrobii (Μακρόβιοι, "long-livers"), which is devoted to longevity, has been attributed to Lucian, although it is generally agreed that he was not the author.^[13] It gives some mythical examples like that of Nestor who lived three generations or Tiresias, the blind seer of Thebes, who lived six generations. It tells about the Seres (Chinese) "who are said to live 300 years" or the people of Athos, "who are also said to live 130 years". Most of the examples of "real" men lived between 80 and 100 years, but ten cases of alleged centenarians are given. It also gives some advice concerning food intake and moderation in general.

There is debate over the authorship of some works, transmitted under Lucian's name, such as De Dea Syria ("On the Syrian goddess"), the Amores and the Ass. These are usually not considered genuine works of Lucian and normally cited under the name of Pseudo-Lucian. The Ass (Λούκιος ἢ ῎Oνος) is probably a summarized version of a story by Lucian and contains largely the same basic plot elements as The Golden Ass (or Metamorphoses) of Apuleius, but with fewer digressions and a different ending.

Language[link]

Lucian wrote Attic dialect with a facility almost equal to Plato. He further imitated Herodotus's Ionic dialect so successfully in his work The Syrian Goddess that some scholars refuse to recognize him as the author.^[14]

See also[link]

• Alexander of Abonoteichus
• Lucian of Samosata on Jesus

References[link]

General

D.S. Richter, "Lives and Afterlives of Lucian of Samosata," Arion (2005) 13.1:75-100.

Specific

Еditions[link]

• Neil Hopkinson (ed.), Lucian: A Selection. Cambridge Greek and Latin Texts (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Lucian

Greek Wikisource has original text related to this article: Lucian

• Lucian of Samosata Project - Articles, Timeline, Maps, Library, and Themes
• A.M. Harmon, Introduction to Lucian of Samosata
• Works by Lucian of Samosata at Project Gutenberg
• Alexander the False Prophet - the successful travelling prophet of Asclepius and his oracular serpent god
• Works of Lucian of Samostata at sacred-texts.com
• The Syrian Goddess, at sacred-texts.com
• Macrobii, at attalus.org
• Contents – Harvard University Press

Lucian Freud
Lucian Freud
Born	(1922-12-08)8 December 1922 Berlin, Germany
Died	20 July 2011(2011-07-20) (aged 88) London, England
Nationality	British
Field	Painting
Training	Central School of Art East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing Goldsmiths College
Movement	Realism

Lucian Michael Freud, OM, CH (8 December 1922 – 20 July 2011)^[1] was a German-born British painter. Known chiefly for his thickly impastoed portrait and figure paintings, he was widely considered the pre-eminent British artist of his time.^[2] His works are noted for their psychological penetration, and for their often discomforting examination of the relationship between artist and model.^[3]

Early life and family[link]

Born in Berlin, Freud was the son of an Austrian Jewish father, Ernst L. Freud, an architect, and a German Jewish mother, Lucie née Brasch.^[4][5] He was a grandson of Sigmund Freud, and elder brother of the late broadcaster, writer and politician Clement Freud (thus uncle of Emma and Matthew Freud) and the younger brother of Stephan Gabriel Freud.

He moved with his family to St John's Wood, London, in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism. He became a British citizen in 1939,^[4] having attended Dartington Hall School in Totnes, Devon, and later Bryanston School,^[6][7] for a year before being expelled due to disruptive behaviour.^[8]

Early career[link]

Freud briefly studied at the Central School of Art in London, and from 1939 with greater success at Cedric Morris' East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham, relocated in 1940 at Benton End near Hadleigh. He also attended Goldsmiths College, part of the University of London, from 1942–3.

He served as a merchant seaman in an Atlantic convoy in 1941 before being invalided out of service in 1942.

In 1943, Tambimuttu, the Sri Lankan editor, commissioned the young artist to illustrate a book of poems by Nicholas Moore entitled "The Glass Tower." It was published the following year by Editions Poetry London and comprised, among other drawings, a stuffed zebra (-cum-unicorn) and a palm tree. Both subjects reappeared in The Painter's Room on display at Freud's first solo exhibition in 1944 at the Alex Reid & Lefevre Gallery. In the summer of 1946, he travelled to Paris before continuing to Greece for several months. In the early fifties Freud was a frequent visitor to Dublin where he would share Patrick Swift's studio^[9] — during this period the artists also worked side by side in London when Swift would visit Freud. He otherwise lived and worked in London for the rest of his life.

Freud formed part of a group of figurative artists that the American artist, Ronald Kitaj, later named "The School of London".^[10] This was more a loose collection of individual artists who knew each other, some intimately, and were working in London at the same time in the figurative style (but during the boom years of abstract painting). The group was led by figures such as Francis Bacon and Freud, and included Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, Leon Kossoff, Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde, Reginald Gray, and Kitaj himself.

He was a visiting tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art of University College London from 1949 to 1954.

Mature style[link]

Freud's early paintings, which are mostly very small, are often associated with German Expressionism (an influence he tended to deny) and Surrealism in depicting people, plants and animals in unusual juxtapositions. Some very early works anticipate the varied flesh tones of his mature style, for example Cedric Morris (1940, National Museum of Wales), but after the end of the war he developed a thinly painted very precise linear style with muted colours, best known in his self-portrait Man with Thistle (1946, Tate^[11] ) and a series of large-eyed portraits of his first wife, Kitty Garman, such as Girl with a Kitten (1947, Tate^[12]). These were painted with tiny sable brushes and evoked Early Netherlandish painting.^[13]

From the 1950s, he began to work in portraiture, often nudes (though his first full length nude was not painted until 1966),^[14] to the almost complete exclusion of everything else, and by the middle of the decade developed a much more free style using large hogs-hair brushes, with an intense concentration of the texture and colour of flesh, and much thicker paint, including impasto. With this technique, he would often clean his brush after each stroke when painting flesh, so that the colour remained constantly variable. He also started to paint standing up, which continued until old age, when he switched to a high chair.^[15] The colours of non-flesh areas in these paintings are typically muted, while the flesh becomes increasingly highly and variably coloured. By about 1960, Freud had established the style that he would use, with some changes, for the rest of his career. The portraits in the new style often used an over life-size scale from the start, but were mostly relatively small heads or half-lengths. Later portraits were often very much larger, and appealed to galleries and collectors. In his late career he often followed a portrait by producing an etching of the subject in a different pose, drawing directly onto the plate, with the sitter in his view.^[16]

Freud's portraits often depict only the sitter, sometimes sprawled naked on the floor or on a bed or alternatively juxtaposed with something else, as in Girl With a White Dog (1951–52) and Naked Man With Rat (1977–78).^[17] According to Edward Chaney, "The distinctive, recumbent manner in which Freud poses so many of his sitters suggests the conscious of unconscious influence both of his grandfather's psychoanalytical couch and of the Egyptian mummy, his dreaming figures, clothed or nude, staring into space until (if ever) brought back to health and/or consciousness. The particular application of this supine pose to freaks, friends, wives, mistresses, dogs, daughters and mother alike (the latter regularly depicted after her suicide attempt and eventually, literally mummy-like in death), tends to support this hypothesis." ^[18]

The use of animals in his compositions is widespread, and often he features a pet and its owner. Other examples of portraits with both animals and people in Freud's work include Guy and Speck (1980–81), Eli and David (2005–06) and Double Portrait (1985–86).^[19] He had a special passion for horses, having enjoyed riding at school in Dartington, where he sometimes slept in the stables.^[20] His portraits solely of horses include Grey Gelding (2003), Skewbald Mare (2004), and Mare Eating Hay (2006). Houseplants, often not in peak condition, featured prominently in some portraits, especially in the 1960s, and Freud also produced a number of paintings purely of plants.^[21] Other regular features included mattresses in earlier works, and huge piles of the linen rags with which he used to clean his brushes in later ones.^[22] Some portraits, especially in the 1980s, have very carefully painted views of London roofscapes seen through the studio windows.^[23]

Freud's subjects, who needed to make a very large and uncertain commitment of their time, were often the people in his life; friends, family, fellow painters, lovers, children. He said, "The subject matter is autobiographical, it's all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement, really.^[24] However the titles were mostly anonymous, and the identity of the sitter not always disclosed; the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire had a portrait of one of Freud's daughters as a baby for several years before he mentioned who the model was. In the 1970s Freud spent 4,000 hours on a series of paintings of his mother, about which art historian Lawrence Gowing observed "it is more than 300 years since a painter showed as directly and as visually his relationship with his mother. And that was Rembrandt."^[25]

Painting from life, Freud was apt to spend a great deal of time with one subject, and demanded the model's presence even while working on the background of the portrait. A nude completed in 2007 required sixteen months of work, with the model posing all but four evenings during that time; with each session averaging five hours, the painting took approximately 2,400 hours to complete.^[26] A rapport with his models was necessary, and while at work, Freud was characterised as "an outstanding raconteur and mimic".^[26] Regarding the difficulty in deciding when a painting is completed, Freud said that "he feels he's finished when he gets the impression he's working on somebody else's painting".^[26] Paintings were divided into day paintings done in natural light and night paintings done under artificial light, and the sessions, and lighting, were never mixed.^[27]

It was Freud's practice to begin a painting by first drawing in charcoal on the canvas. He then applied paint to a small area of the canvas, and gradually worked outward from that point. For a new sitter, he often started with the head as a means of "getting to know" the person, then painted the rest of the figure, eventually returning to the head as his comprehension of the model deepened.^[26] A section of canvas was intentionally left bare until the painting was finished, as a reminder that the work was in progress.^[26] The finished painting is an accumulation of richly worked layers of pigment, as well as months of intense observation.^[26]

In art critic Martin Gayford's 2010 book, Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud, Gayford chronicled the forty days he spent with Lucian Freud while sitting for his portrait. Gayford surmised that Freud sought to capture his model's individuality by, as Gayford named it, his "omnivorous" gaze. Gayford also mentions that his final portrait seemed to "reveal secrets—ageing, ugliness, faults—that I imagine...I am hiding from the world..." – suggesting how sharp and penetrating Freud's gaze is.^[28]

Later career[link]

"I paint people," Freud said, "not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be."^[29] Freud painted fellow artists, including Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon. He produced a series of portraits of the performance artist Leigh Bowery, and also painted Henrietta Moraes, a muse to many Soho artists. A series of huge nude portraits from the mid-1990s depicted the very large Sue Tilley, or "Big Sue", some using her job title of "Benefits Supervisor" in the title of the painting,^[30] as in his 1995 portrait Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, which in May 2008 was sold by Christie's in New York for $33.6 million, setting a world record auction price for a living artist.^[31][32]

Freud's most consistent model in his later years was his studio assistant and friend David Dawson, the subject of his final, unfinished work.^[33] Towards the end of his life he did a nude portrait of model Kate Moss. Freud was one of the best known British artists working in a representational style, and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1989.^[34][35][36]

His painting After Cézanne, which is notable because of its unusual shape, was bought by the National Gallery of Australia for $7.4 million. The top left section of this painting has been 'grafted' on to the main section below, and closer inspection reveals a horizontal line where these two sections were joined.

In 1996, Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal mounted a major exhibition of 27 paintings and thirteen etchings, covering the whole period of Freud's working life to date. The following year the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art presented "Lucian Freud: Early Works". The exhibition comprised around 30 drawings and paintings done between 1940 and 1945.^[37] This was followed by a large retrospective at Tate Britain in 2002. During a period from May 2000 to December 2001, Freud painted Queen Elizabeth II. There was criticism of this portrayal of the Queen in some sections of the British media. The highest selling tabloid newspaper, The Sun, was particularly condemnatory, describing the portrait as "a travesty".^[38] In 2005, a retrospective of Freud's work was held at the Museo Correr in Venice scheduled to coincide with the Biennale. In late 2007, a collection of Freud's etchings titled "Lucian Freud: The Painter's Etchings" went on display at the Museum of Modern Art.^[39] In 2012 (9 February to 27 May) there is a large posthumous exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

In November 2008, letters written by Freud were obtained by The Independent under the Freedom of Information Act. They detail his bitter dispute with some of the most powerful figures in the art world after he was asked to represent Britain at the 1954 Venice Biennale, the world's leading contemporary art exhibition. The publicity-shy portrait painter locked horns with gallery officials after a selection committee rebuffed his suggestions of works to show in Italy. The article includes a copy of the letter written by Freud to the British Council complaining about the selection process.^[40]

On October 13, 2011, Freud's 1952 Boy's Head, a small portrait of Charlie Lumley, his neighbour, reached $4,998,088 at Sotheby's London Contemporary art evening auction, making it one of the highlights of the 2011 auction autumn season^[41].

Personal life[link]

Freud is rumoured to have fathered as many as forty children^[42] although this number is generally accepted as an exaggeration. Fourteen children have been identified, two from Freud's first marriage and 12 by various mistresses.^[43]

After an affair with Lorna Garman, he went on to marry, in 1948, her niece Kathleen "Kitty" Epstein, daughter of sculptor Jacob Epstein and socialite Kathleen Garman. They had two daughters, Annie and Annabel Freud, and the marriage ended in 1952.^[44] Kitty Freud, later known as Kitty Godley, died in 2011.^[45]

Freud then began an affair with Guinness beer heiress and writer Lady Caroline Blackwood. They married in 1953 and divorced in 1959.^[44] She is said to have been the only woman who truly broke his heart. After their divorce, his friends noticed a change in him; he began drinking heavily and getting into fights. Francis Bacon became concerned that he was suicidal.^[46][47]

Freud had additional children by the following women:^[43]

• Suzy Boyt, a pupil of Freud's at the Slade art school:^[48]

1. Alexander Boyt
2. Rose Boyt
3. Isabel Boyt
4. Susie Boyt

• Katherine Margaret McAdam (died 1998):

1. Paul Freud
2. Lucy Freud^[49]
3. David McAdam Freud
4. Jane McAdam Freud, an artist^[50]

• Bernardine Coverley, a teacher (died 2011):

1. Bella Freud, a fashion designer
2. Esther Freud, a writer

• Jacquetta Eliot, Countess of St Germans (née the Hon. Jacquetta Lampson):

1. The Hon. Francis Michael Eliot (born 1971)

• Celia Paul (born 1959), an artist:

1. Frank Paul (born 1985), an artist^[51]

Selected solo exhibitions[link]

• 1994: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
• 2003: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
• 2004: National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh
• 2005: Museo Correr, Venice
• 2006: Acquavella Galleries, New York
• 2007: Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
• 2008: Museum of Modern Art, New York
• 2008: Gemeentemuseum Den Haag
• 2010: Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
• 2012: National Portrait Gallery, London

See also[link]

• Freud family

Notes[link]