Lucian Freud was born in Berlin in 1922, the son a Jewish architect and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. Along with his family, Freud fled Berlin to settle in Britain in 1933 to escape the rise of the Nazis. He attended the Central School of Arts and Crafts, the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, and Goldsmiths College before serving with the Merchant Navy during WWII. During the 1950s, Freud was propelled to fame as part of the Soho set around the Colony Club that included Francis Bacon, Michael Andrews, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach. Freud was also invited by William Coldstream, Professor at the Slade School of Art, to join the teaching staff; Freud taught part-time from 1949 to 1954 to an immensely talented generation of young artists that included Craigie Aitchison and Euan Uglow. Freud was arguably the most famous and highly regarded British painter of the 20th and 21st centuries, until his death in 2011. His studio-based practice focused almost exclusively on painting portraits of his family, including lovers and children, friends, and those by whom he was fascinated. He scrutinised, with an unmatched rigour, anatomy, the appearance of flesh and skin, and the more elusive qualities of psyche and emotion. Famed for his highly detailed yet expressive and painterly style, Freud's seven-decade career was marked by a relentless obsession and dedication to his work. Freud's seminal piece, 'Benefits Supervisor Sleeping', 1995, sold at Christie's in 2008 for $33.6 million, making it the most expensive artwork by a living artist to be sold at auction. Major retrospectives have been held at the Metroplitan Museum of Art, New York, 1994, MoMA, New York, 2008, National Portrait Gallery, London, 2012, and Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien, 2013. His work is held by all major international public collections. A highly accomplished draughtsman from the outset of his career, Freud turned to etching during a trip to Paris in 1946 as an extension of this practice: these etchings of his first wife, Kitty, in their hotel room are among some of Freud's most iconic and personal early works. Freud abandoned etching entirely two years later, and it was not until 1982 that he was persuaded by Lawrence Gowing to return to the medium, initially producing portrait heads. In 1985, Freud begun a more ambitious project, etching four, full-length studies of naked sitters, two men and two women, including 'Blond Girl', 1985. This discrete group presented imense technical and creative challenges and signalled Freud's intention to treat etching as a medium that could facilitate works of gravity and significance. 'Blond Girl' belongs to Freud's particular genre of 'Naked Portraits', as opposed to the traditional nude. By focusing on the naked over the nude, Freud emphasised the rawness, the intimacy and the animality of these portraits. 'Blond Girl', 1985, is closely related to the oil painting, 'Blond Girl, Night Portrait', 1985, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, but rather than evolving from the painting or serving as a copy of it, 'Blond Girl' is a distinct portrait of the same sitter. In his book, 'Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud', Martin Gayford describes the process of sitting separately for portraits in oil paint and etching. The second sitting for the etching only begun once the oil was complete, and the two interactions had entirely different atmospheres resulting in markedly divergent portraits. Freud said to Lawrence Gowing, "I take readings from a number of positions because I don't want to miss anything that could be of use to me." [L. Freud, quoted in C. Hartley, The Etchings of Lucian Freud: A Catalogue Raisonné (Bergamo, Marlborough Graphics and Galleria Ceribelli, 1995), p. 14.]. Etching with a needle onto the wax-covered plate, Freud worked directly from the sitter. The final prints of the etching bear traces of this process. In 'Blond Girl', pentimenti-style, shadow lines can be seen in various passages, including around the model's shoulders. Craig Hartley has argued that, "Shifts of contour are left partly to imply movement, but Freud also compares these remnants to the way people correct themselves in conversation and leave sometimes contradictory words hanging in the air, which contribute to their meaning even after correction." [C. Harley, pp. 27-29]. The most noticeable alteration between the painting and etching of this model is Freud's removal of extraneous background detail. The sofa on which the model reclines, head and left shoulder resting on the large, padded arm, is not included. As a result, the model's position of repose - though seen from an awkward angle - in the painting is transformed into one of uncomfortable and inexplicable contorsion. We see her from extremely close quarters, her knees projecting right towards us. Robert Flynn Johnson has linked 'Blond Girl' to Degas's 'keyhole' pastels of women bathing: in its amalgamation of awkward posture with unabashed intimacy, Freud's depiction certainly echoes Degas's pastels but without the element of voyeurism [R. Flynn Johnson, 'The Later Works 1961-1987' in Lucian Freud: Works on Paper (Thames and Hudson), p. 21.]. Freud's depiction is sensual but raw, skirting a line between familiarity and uncomfortable proximity. He said in an interview in 1993, "Through my intimacy with the people I portray, I may have depicted aspects of them which they [viewers] find intrusive." [L. Freud, quoted in 'Art and Love: Lucian Freud interviewed by Leight Bowery' in Lucian Freud: Recent Drawings and Etchings (ex. cat. Matthew Marks Gallery, 1993) unpaginated]. In 'Blond Girl', Freud unites ambitious grandeur in scale and dynamic force of etched lines with skill in creating tone and shadow through hatched etched lines. Martin Gayford described Freud's studio as "a theatre of light" [M. Gayford, p. 226.]. Removing the colour of paint and the shading of drawing, Freud instead relies on the black line alone. Though he worked with a thin needle, his lines carry a vehement weight, and, in areas such as the face, knees, and left arm, he works quite heavily; other passages are entirely free of markings. Starr Figura describes how Freud models "the girl's flesh mainly at the edges, layering and bunching the lines to suggest the different ways the skin has of stretching and slipping" [S. Figura, The Painter's Etchings [ex. cat. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2007), p. 24.]. Removing all narrative details and realised with just contour and line, Freud's 'Blond Girl' is Intimate, personal, erotic yet forceful, "very silent and very grand, so much so that they invade and disturb" in the words of Catherine Lampert [C. Lampert, Lucian Freud: Recent Work (ex. cat. Whitechapel, 1993), p. 11.]. An extraordinary example of Freud's accomplished return to the medium, 'Blond Girl' is amongst the most ambitious of Freud's etchings and indeed of his 'Naked Portraits'.