Immortalised: King in his former restaurant
(Picture: Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd)A Lucian Freud portrait of restaurateur Jeremy King, who revived the Ivy, Le Caprice and for many years ran Piccadilly institution The Wolseley, is to be sold in an auction this autumn.
Straightforwardly titled “Head of Jeremy King”, the piece is technically an unfinished work and accordingly has remained as a copper plate rather than becoming an etching, as the rest of Freud’s plates were. As such it is a one-off; the estimate for it is £250,000—£350,000.
It will go on sale at Sotheby’s on October 15, and comes from King’s personal art collection.
King and Freud shared a friendship stretching back three decades, though they became closer in the last decade of the late artist’s life. Freud would dine in The Wolseley most evenings, sometimes accompanied by the likes of Kate Moss, Frank Auerbach or David Hockney. As the pair became close, Freud invited King to sit for him; at first for a painting between 2006-07, and then for the copper plate that is being sold.
The work, which was started in 2008, remained in Freud’s studio at the time of the artist’s death in 2011.
Speaking of their friendship, King said: “From the moment Lucian started coming into The Caprice in the Eighties, he was always very much part of my world, but it was not until the opening of The Wolseley in 2003 that I really got to know him. It was a place he would adopt as his home over the next eight years, and he became, over time, the only person I would sit with in the restaurant except my immediate family.
“He would come up to six, sometimes seven times a week for dinner, often post-sittings, usually with a model, but never could I have dreamt that I would become one of them.”
Freud was so associated with The Wolseley — where he tended to eat moules-frites and drink his own wine, which was kept in the restaurant’s cellars — that the night after his death, a black cloth was placed over his table, with a candle lit for him. Later, an ice cream pudding, a Coupe Lucian, was named for him.
Oliver Barker, Sotheby’s Chairman of Europe, said of the work: “Freud was a social commentator as much as an artist, and it was not lost on him that King’s restaurants were the ultimate melting pots of their time, with King — the conductor at the centre of it all — being a natural subject for one of his portraits.
“Freud’s determination to continue preparing this portrait until his final days was as much a statement of his intent to remain a working artist until the very end, as it was a reflection of his wish to continue spending valuable time with his friend.”
King is presently between restaurants, after acrimoniously splitting from the Wolseley in April of this year. He expected to open a new venture in the spring of 2023.
