The novelist Esther Freud (b. 1963) was the daughter of Lucian Freud and Bernardine Coverley. The best-known of her works is the autobiographical novel Hideous Kinky (1992, Hamish Hamilton). Like her sister Bella Freud and many other half-siblings, Esther Freud sat for several pictures by her father. After she moved to London in 1979, the following year she sat for a nude portrait, Esther (1980), which related to other naked portraits that Freud painted of his daughters as young women around that time; others depicted Bella and Rose Boyt. (He once observed, ‘my naked daughters have nothing to be ashamed of.’) She later described that early experience of sitting for her father as an affirmative one: ‘It was the first time I’d spent that much time with him, a really lovely way to get to know him.’ She also sat for a clothed double portrait with her sister, Bella and Esther (1987–88, Private Collection). But she mostly stopped sitting when she abandoned an acting career in favour of writing: ‘It’s almost unbearable if you’re busy. There you are. Nothing you can do.’ This print, a portrait head made in 1991 when she was aged twenty-eight, and a slightly larger head-and-shoulders painting made the following year were the last works she modelled for. In both pictures Freud adopted a frontal composition in which the sitter looks outwards with an introspective gaze. In both cases the face is animated by unexpected pools of shadow that animate the checks, mouth and jawline, cast by the intense light of overhead lamps that Freud used in his studio.

This print was published by James Kirkman in London and Brooke Alexander in New York. It was printed by Mark Balakjian at Studio Prints, London. This impression, an artist’s proof, was given by Freud to a friend whose nickname was ‘Arb’ (as in Arborio rice), and an inscription by the artist reads ‘E to A’.