Four years after Lucian Freud’s death, in 2011, his childhood artworks, letters, and sketchbooks, filled with hundreds of drawings, were given to the British government in lieu of death duties, and the Lucian Freud Archive at the National Portrait Gallery was born. This collection provides the foundation of the exhibition “Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting,” which has just opened at the gallery. Here, we can follow Freud’s artistic journey from the brightly colored sketches of a little boy who invented a “zebra unicorn” as a dream pony to the towering figure of 20th-century British art, whose work radiates postwar ennui with a limited “Londony” palette. READ ON