One of Lucian Freud’s most famous paintings, ‘Pregnant Girl’, is to be sold at auction for the first time
The remarkable painting, Pregnant Girl, one of Freud’s most famous from the period, is to be sold at auction for the first time, set to fetch up to £10 million at Sotheby’s more than half a century after it was created.
One of the most famous paintings by a British artist is expected to fetch £10million at auction more than 50 years since it was created.
Pregnant Girl by Lucian Freud, which depicts his then-teenage lover Bernardine Coverley carrying their daughter Bella, will go under the hammer at Sotheby’s next month.
German-born Freud painted the portrait in a west London studio in the early 1960s after he fell in love with the former convent schoolgirl, who went on to mother two of his children.
Not much is known about the late artist’s relationship with Coverley, who later moved to Morocco with their daughters Bella and Esther, later depicted in film Hideous Kinky starring Kate Winslet.
But Bella, 54, now an internationally-acclaimed fashion designer, said her mother was very proud of the painting and shared a ‘happy time’ with Lucian.
She told The Sunday Telegraph: ‘I like that my mother was so clearly in my father’s thoughts and gaze, that at this time she was really important to him.
‘She didn’t talk about the painting but she was proud of it – I could tell by the tone of her voice when she first told me that it was of her pregnant with me in that picture.’
