Portrait of Lucian Freud

Birthday profile

Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud, German-English painter and illustrator (died 2011)

Born
December 8, 1922
Died
July 20, 2011
Zodiac sign
Sagittarius
Birth year
1922

About Lucian Freud

Lucian Michael Freud (; 8 December 1922 – 20 July 2011) was a British painter and draughtsman, specialising in figurative art, who is known as one of the foremost 20th-century English portraitists. His early career as a painter was influenced by surrealism, and afterwards by expressionism, but by the early 1950s his often stark and alienated paintings tended towards realism. Freud was an intensely private and guarded man, and his paintings, completed over a 60-year career, are mostly of friends and family. They are generally sombre and thickly impastoed, often set in unsettling interiors and urban landscapes. The works are noted for their psychological penetration and often discomfiting examination of the relationship between artist and model. Freud worked from life studies and was known for asking for extended and punishing sittings from his models.

Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.

Career and life highlights

The world when Lucian Freud was born

Lucian Freud was born in 1922. The year snapshot below places that birthday in its cultural and historical setting: the music and films people were following, the headlines shaping public life, and the everyday prices families encountered.

Culture in 1922

  • #1 song"Chicago" – Fred Fisher
  • Top movieNosferatu
  • Best-selling bookUlysses – James Joyce

Headlines and milestones

  • Major sports momentGene Sarazen wins the U.S. Open at age 20
  • Top headlineMussolini marches on Rome and seizes power in Italy
  • Technology milestoneBBC begins radio broadcasts
  • Defining fadCrossword puzzles
  • Notable inventionWater skiing invented in Minnesota
  • World population1.90 billion

United States snapshot

  • U.S. leaderWarren G. Harding
  • Sports championNew York Giants (World Series)
  • U.S. population110.0M

1922 versus 2026

These figures put everyday life in Lucian Freud's birth year beside the site's latest United States snapshot.

Measure19222026
Gas$0.25$3.45/gal
Average home$5,600$435,000
Average income$3,270$67,500
Movie ticket$0.15$11.95
Postage stamp$0.02$0.73
Population110.0M341 million

Sources and editorial standards

This profile combines a biographical source with structured birthday and historical context. Sources recorded for this profile: Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Library of Congress, Wikidata. See our editorial policy for sourcing, corrections, and review standards.

Read the source biography on Wikipedia. Wikipedia text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.