Renowned artist Lucian Freud (1922-2011) is commemorated in an exhibition of fifty portraits spanning his working life, held at The National Portrait Gallery London from February to May 2012. The review explores the development of his art from the potent and hyper-sensed studies of the 1940s to major paintings in the later phase, where the artist engaged in a complex and sometimes brutal meditation on the human being, drawn from an intimate engagement with the sitter. Freud's unsparing eye maps his subjects, sustaining single handed an almost unique commitment to the ambitions of high art, grounded in the canons of classic Western tradition.The monograph also includes a review of Freud's figure drawings, exhibited at BlainSouthern Gallery.Marina Vaizey is an art critic, lecturer and traveller; her books include The Artist as Photographer, 100 Masterpieces of Art; Great Women Collectors. She was the art critic for the Financial Times for four years, and The Sunday Times for eighteen. She has curated several exhibitions and written many catalogues. She has been a Trustee for several national museums. Nicholas James studied painting with Frank Auerbach and Keith Vaughan at the Slade School UCL. He formed Cv Publications in 1992 and Cv/Visual Arts Research in 1995.