Freud came to England when he was about 10, his architect father having decided to escape the threat of Hitler's Germany. He trained at the Central School of Art, London, the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, Dedham, and Goldsmith's College, London. His first published work, a self-portrait sketch, appeared in an avant-garde magazine when he was 17. As a teenager he joined the Merchant Navy but was invalided out in 1942.

Freud's powerful and distinctive realism first attracted attention in 1951, when his Interior at Paddington won a prize at the Festival of Britain. Thereafter he has concentrated on portraits, often nude, where the subjects tend to be friends or even relatives.

However, the titles often fail to mention the subjects' names and the works are by no means conventional portraits. They reveal a subjective intensity that is both startling and disconcerting, and seem to be more about paint than personalities. Freud's style has been described as creating flesh with paints.

Meticulously executed, Freud's work is realist in one sense, but critics such as Robert Hughes point out that his paintings go far beyond naturalism. Freud is unique in his ability to paint the texture of skin over flesh, and his portraits have a subjective, haunting quality that has led to him being dubbed 'the Ingres of existentialism'. Freud's achievement is to refashion an entire genre, which is traditionally devoted to the sensual and voluptuous, into an exploration of anxiety, discomfort, and even repugnance.

Although he works in a figurative style, Freud does not fit neatly into any category or school. His importance has long been recognised in England, but his present super-celebrity status probably dates from a retrospective exhibition held at Washington, DC in 1987. In the catalogue to this exhibition, Robert Hughes described Freud as 'the greatest living realist painter'.