Lucian Freud’s Portrait of His Daughter Debuts at Auction With an Estimate Over $18 Million
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A portrait Lucian Freud painted of his daughter Isobel in 1997 will make its auction debut on March 1 at Sotheby’s London, with an estimate of between £15 million and £20 million (US$18 million and US$24 million).
Painted over a year with more than 70 sittings, the portrait depicts Isobel Boyt, known as Ib to her family, reading Marcel Proust’s 4,000-page novel Remembrance of Things Past, wearing a loose dress, with her bare feet up on a chair and the book in her lap.
The portrait, aptly titled Ib Reading, was acquired by a private collector shortly after its creation and has remained in the same collection since. It was last seen publicly more than 20 years ago in an exhibition in New York, according to Sotheby’s.
The portrait will be offered as a highlight of Sotheby’s evening auction of modern and contemporary art.
Other star lots of the sale include Pablo Picasso’s portrait of his daughter, Maya, formerly owned by Gianni Versace and estimated to sell for between £12 million and £20 million; a newly restituted painting by Wassily Kandinsky, Murnau mit Kirche II, which is expected to fetch in the region of £35 million; and one of Gerhard Richter’s Abstract masterpieces, Abstraktes Bild, estimated in excess of £20 million.
Freud’s Ib Reading is one of five painted portraits of his daughter. The first was Large Interior, Paddington (1968-69), which was made when Isobel was just seven years old. The portrait is now in the collection of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, Spain, which is hosting a major retrospective of the artist, Lucian Freud: New Perspectives, until June.
In 1992, Freud also painted Isobel with the father of her children, while she was pregnant with her youngest daughter Alice.
“My father never chose the pose of his sitters. He would often make suggestions, but he never said, ‘I want you wearing this and sitting there’. There were limited possibilities with the studio too,” Isobel, 60, said in a statement through Sotheby’s.
Reading the novel Remembrance of Things Past while sitting for her father was her own choice, she said in the statement. “I wished to read. It was something I normally wouldn’t have time to do with three young children. It was an opportunity,” she said.
Freud’s auction record was set by his painting Large Interior W11 (After Watteau), 1981-83, which sold from the collection of Paul Allen for US$86.3 million last November at Christie’s in New York.
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The federal budget has rattled property investors. But the biggest mistake isn’t the tax changes, it’s the conclusion many are drawing from them.
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The recent budget has forced a reckoning for property investors.
Negative gearing now restricted to new residential builds, the CGT discount gone and on paper, the numbers look different.
And many investors are responding by pivoting toward yield, prioritising cash flow over capital growth in a way that property strategists say misses the point entirely.
“The debate has shifted to yield versus growth as if they are opposing forces,” says Abdullah Nouh, founder of Melbourne-based buyers’ agency Mecca Property Group. “But that framing is itself the mistake.”
Nouh, who works with high-net-worth families and investors on long-term acquisition strategy, argues that capital growth remains the primary driver of genuine wealth creation and that the post-budget environment has made quality assets more important, not less.
The numbers make his case plainly. An additional $500 per week in rental income is welcome. A prestige asset appreciating by $1 million over a market cycle is transformative.
These are not equivalent outcomes, and portfolios built around yield at the expense of location and land value tend to generate income while wealth stands largely still.
The more nuanced shift Nouh is seeing among sophisticated investors is a move toward assets where both outcomes can be engineered simultaneously – established homes on substantial land in quality locations, where the existing dwelling can be repositioned, rental returns improved, and the underlying land value compounds independent of what sits on it.
For investors with existing equity, commercial property is also entering the conversation in a more serious way.
Prestige industrial assets, medical centres and long-leased essential retail offer income profiles that residential property in most capital city markets cannot currently match: longer lease terms, tenants covering outgoings, and greater predictability than the residential tenancy cycle.
“The investors who build lasting wealth are rarely the ones who chased yield or growth exclusively,” says Nouh.
“They are the ones who built a strategy they could sustain – one that generated enough income to hold quality assets through multiple cycles while those assets compounded in value.”
The budget has changed the settings. It has not changed the fundamentals.
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