Encarnacion in the Square is a pen and ink drawing of Lucian Freud and Kitty Garman’s daughter Annie Freud. Freud and Epstein were married between 1948 and 1952, and they had two daughters, Annie (b. 1948) and Annabel (b. 1952). The model is depicted in a pose suggestive of introspection and emotional fragility. Her hands are clasped together in her lap, her legs are held tight together and splayed to the right, and the head is downcast. Her facial expression is vacant. The big toe of her right foot is tucked into the heel of her left foot, a poignant detail suggestive of the sitter’s prepossessed mood and the naturalistic, unconsidered quality of the pose. The draughtsmanship is fluent and efficient, communicating a sense of the subject with great economy. The drawing’s faux-naïf style was partly indebted to Picasso and borders on caricature. The face is exaggerated to fill most of the head, and the features are arresting and fulsome. The thick lips, large nose and half-closed eyes are non-naturalistic but expressive, and the image is sincerely felt.

Notwithstanding its sincerity, the mood of the sitter is not authentic but theatrical. The drawing depicts Annie in the title character of Encarnacion, which should played in the inaugural stage production of Encarnacion in the Square. A theatrical monologue written by Frank Castillo, The Best Plays of 1968-1969 included the following brief description of the play: ‘World premiere of Venezuelan play about a young girl's frustrations. With Anne Freud.’ Annie Freud has described the play and the circumstances in which her father’s drawing came about:

It was a monologue, although there was another silent role on the stage. Encarnacion was the name of the blind woman I played. It tells the story of a woman who relives her whole life with her husband, Olo, the moment a car hits her on the Square of the town where she lives. Dad came to every night of the play and gave me detailed comments after each performance.

The drawing was a poster design. Although copies of the poster itself are rare, one surviving example is owned by Annie Freud. Its function as a poster explains both the superadded inscription (‘ENCARNATION IN THE SQ[U]ARE’) and the attractive simplification of form, which anticipates transposition into a reproducible graphic medium. The precise border around the figure – a square – is a witty allusion to the title of the play and to the drama in which Encarnacion delivers her monologue in the setting of a city square.

Freud’s relationships with various women produced no less than fourteen children. Being unwilling to enter a regular domestic situation, which would necessarily constrain his long work hours and dissolute lifestyle, he instead sought to connect with his children by inviting them to sit for him. Annie Freud sat for several works as a teenager, including Annie (1962), Naked Child Laughing (1963) and Annie Reading (1969). Encarnacion in the Square is one of the last works that she appeared in.

Some years after it was made, Freud gave or sold Encarnacion in the Square to his friend and sitter Raymond Jones. Jones appeared in several paintings by Freud from the late 1970s, including Naked Man with Rat (1977-78, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth). A label apparently contemporary with the work gives the title as ‘Encarnation in the Square – Annie’. It is unclear who affixed this label; it carries no address or gallery name, but the cataloguing seems professional and suggests that the work may have been handled by a dealer or gallery at some point early in its history.