Head of a Naked Girl projects motion and fluidity. Nothing is static, from the undulating shadows of her collarbone to the shifting patches of light across her face. A lock of windblown hair mimics the curve of her shoulder below. The sitter was Nicola-Rose O’Hara, who modelled for Freud during the late 1990s and early 2000s. She appears in several of Freud’s paintings, such as Naked Portrait Standing (1999; The Lambrecht-Schadeberg Collection). O’Hara kept a diary during this period, which she later published in 2021 under the title Girl with Two Fingers. In it, she describes how she felt unconnected to the portraits for which she modelled, understanding them to be more a reflection of Freud than of herself.

Despite this etching’s cropped view, the title specifically – and perhaps unnecessarily – describes the girl as naked. Freud possibly started with a larger view in which more of her body was visible and cut the plate down at a later stage. However, two portraits Freud painted of O’Hara during the same period adopt a similarly cropped composition and the same title: Head of a Naked Girl (1999; UBS Art collection) and Head of a Naked Girl II (1999; Lambrecht-Schadeberg Collection). One wonders whether the viewer is intended to read some element or quality of nakedness not in her unseen body, but in her facial expression. Or perhaps it is a vaguely prurient invitation to imagine her unincluded nakedness.

Studio Prints, London; accepted under the Cultural Gifts Scheme by HM Government from the archive of Studio Prints gifted by the Balakjian family and allocated to The Courtauld, 2024.

Treves, Toby, Lucian Freud : Catalogue Raisonné of the Prints. London : Modern Art Press, 2022.
Cat. 91 on pp. 228-229
pp. 228, 240
This refers to the editioned print.