Nose (Janey Longman) is a finely drawn partial study of a woman’s face. Although the image is restricted to the nose and brow, these areas are brought to a high pitch of visual accuracy and completeness: the ridge of the nose is indicated with a softened outline; the surface of the skin is closely modelled, with areas of direct light contrasting subtly variegated areas of half-tone. The morphology of the face is convincingly three-dimensional. The awkward inlets and protuberances are established with great precision using a system of fine-grained parallel hatching and cross-hatching. The model is reclining and the perspective consequently produces a shallow foreshortening, which further exacerbates the nose’s peculiar shape, distinguished as it is by a jaunty, elongated tip.

The drawing was an informal life study and there was never any suggestion of it developing into something more than a partial study. There is a casual similarity between Nose (Janey Longman) and Girl with Closed Eyes (fig.1), which depicts the same sitter, both images picturing the raised nose from below. The similarity is coincidental, however, and the drawing was not made in preparation for the painting. The sitter, Janey Longman, has remembered the circumstances in which the drawing was made:

I have a feeling it was possibly [made] during an evening when Lucian wasn’t working on a painting, or had had a rest from working on one. I think I remember lying there and him just picking up a pencil, unannounced, and starting to draw. I didn’t really know what was going on until seeing it later. […] He had commented on my nose previously (affectionately!) and I think just felt drawn to focusing on it that evening and putting it on paper!

The pictorial completeness achieved in this fragment is telling of Freud’s characteristic method. When he was a student at the East Anglia School of Art in 1939 and 1940, he assimilated his teacher Cedric Morris’s technique of making a picture by constructing it in sequential areas. A section of the picture surface was brought to completion before the neighbouring area was begun; work proceeded until the whole surface was covered. This technique ensured that each area of the surface was tightly connected to every other area, and that the completed image had a tension created by a heightened degree of local individuation. Speaking to the art critic John McEwen in 1993, Freud said: ‘I think in good pictures there isn’t such a thing as “background”’. No element of a picture was taken for granted. In Nose (Janey Longman), the fastidious realisation of a localised feature reflects Freud’s general attitude to picture making.

Longman was a friend and occasional model of Freud’s. She sat for at least three completed paintings: Naked Girl (1985-86); Girl with Closed Eyes (fig. 1); and, with India Jane Birley, daughter of the nightclub proprietor Mark Birley, Two Women (1992). Speaking to his biographer William Feaver, Freud gave these recollections of Longman:

When very young, she took up with Bobby Newton and Natalie Newton’s son – full of hates and fears – and she was with Tim Behrens, and with James Fox for a long time. She’s certainly vulnerable and she had a pretty bad time, but she’s got a very strong character.

It was reportedly Longman that suggested Freud should paint Francis Wyndham’s portrait, which he did in 1993. She was mutual friends with another of Freud’s sitters, the fashion model Jerry Hall, who sat for him in 1997.

From around 1950 until his death in 2011, Freud’s predominant medium was oil paint. After an initial phase during the forties, in which drawing was a central aspect of his activities as an artist, he infrequently used a variety of graphic media on paper. The variety of these drawings was recorded in Lucian Freud: works on paper, which accompanied an exhibition at the South Bank Centre held in 1988. The technical facility achieved in such a range of different media (pastel, charcoal, pen and ink, pencil, watercolour), with apparently minimal time for practice and development in each, reflects Freud’s exceptional practical ability. No later than the fifties, he was using charcoal, lightly applied to canvas, as a means of loosely forecasting a painting’s development. Despite always painting from life, such underdrawing – much like informal studies such as Nose (Janey Longman) – provided supplementary visual information that helped bring to fruition a painted image.