Colin Anderson was an early patron and supporter of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, both of whom would occasionally borrow significant amounts of money from him in the late 1940s and early 1950s. (In one letter, written in 1952 – the approximate date of this drawing – Freud wrote, ‘PLEASE could you lend me two hundred pounds...I don’t want you to think that I am imposing on you as a friend, so could you consider it a business arrangement as if I were a firm or a company’, to which Anderson replied, ‘My dear Lucian, How rash of you – how unwise – to ask me ‘to think of you as a firm or company’. As such you would be turned down flat, as being unable to provide any security for such a loan. Luckily for you I know so much more of those extraordinary creatures, firms and companies, than you ever will, that I cannot even begin to think of you in terms of them. So I must think of you, as you forbid me to do so in terms of friendship, as Lucian Freud, just a person of that name, with certain talents and habits and commitments and potentialities. Looked at in that cold way the commitments seem rather large. Is Lucian Freud living with proper frugality? Is he flesh potting, like some bloated shipowner?...I enclose a cheque for £200. I promise you it gives me no kick as a pleasant exercise in power-patronage. Rather the reverse, I feel somewhat ashamed of being able to afford it and yet, at the same time, not giving it sweetly without all this lecturing.’5) In gratitude for his financial support, Freud gave Colin Anderson a collaborative notebook of texts by Stephen Spender accompanied by Freud’s drawings, done in Wales several years earlier in 1939, which Anderson eventually returned to the artist in 1968. As collectors, Sir Colin and Lady Anderson (fig.1) assembled a fine collection of Art Nouveau works of art, which was bequeathed to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. Among contemporary artists, as well as three drawings by Freud (bought in 1948, 1952 and 1969), the Andersons owned works by Edward Ardizzone, Francis Bacon, Prunella Clough, Robert Colquhoun, John Craxton, Barbara Hepworth, David Jones, Wyndham Lewis, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Ceri Richards, Matthew Smith and Graham Sutherland. In pencil drawings such as this portrait of Lady Anderson (fig.2) can be seen the lifelong influence on Lucian Freud of the portrait drawings of the great 19th century French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. This is especially true of Freud’s portraits of the late 1940s and 1950s, leading to Herbert Read’s celebrated and perceptive description of the artist as ‘the Ingres of existentialism.’ Freud’s appreciation of Ingres’s skill as a draughtsman remained undimmed throughout his career. Indeed, as he once said of Ingres, ‘His drawing is evocative in a way that forces us to believe in it. A line, any single line, of his drawings is worth looking at.’6
1.
2.