The family emigrated to St John’s Wood, London, in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism. Lucian became a British subject in 1939, having attended Dartington Hall School in Totnes, Devon, and later Bryanston School, for a year before being expelled owing to disruptive behaviour.

Freud briefly studied at the Central School of Art in London, and from 1939 to 1942 with greater success at Cedric Morris’ East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham, relocated in 1940 to Benton End, a house near Hadleigh, Suffolk. He also attended Goldsmiths’ College, part of the University of London, in 1942–43. He served as a merchant seaman in an Atlantic convoy in 1941 before being invalided out of service in 1942.

In 1943, the poet and editor Meary James Thurairajah Tambimuttu commissioned the young artist to illustrate a book of poems by Nicholas Moore entitled The Glass Tower. It was published the following year by Editions Poetry London and comprised, among other drawings, a stuffed zebra and a palm tree. Both subjects reappeared in The Painter’s Room on display at Freud’s first solo exhibition in 1944 at the Lefevre Gallery. In the summer of 1946, he travelled to Paris before continuing to Greece for several months to visit John Craxton. In the early fifties he was a frequent visitor to Dublin where he would share Patrick Swift’s studio. He remained a Londoner for the rest of his life.

After an affair with Lorna Garman, he went on to marry, in 1948, her niece Kitty Garman, daughter of sculptor Jacob Epstein and socialite Kathleen Garman. They had two daughters, Annabel Freud and the poet Annie Freud, before their marriage ended in 1952. Kitty Freud, later known as Kitty Godley (after her marriage in 1955 to economist Wynne Godley), died in 2011.

In late 1952, Freud eloped with Guinness heiress and writer Lady Caroline Blackwood to Paris, where they married in 1953; they divorced in 1959.

Freud’s most consistent model in his later years was his studio assistant and friend David Dawson, the subject of his final, unfinished work. Towards the end of his life he did a nude portrait of model Kate Moss. Freud was one of the best known British artists working in a representational style, and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1989.

Freud painted fellow artists, including Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon and produced a large number of portraits of the performance artist Leigh Bowery, and also painted Henrietta Moraes, a muse to many Soho artists. A series of huge nude portraits from the mid-1990s depicted the very large Sue Tilley, or “Big Sue”, some using her job title of “Benefits Supervisor” in the title of the painting, as in his 1995 portrait Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, which in May 2008 was sold by Christie’s in New York for $33.6 million, setting a world record auction price for a living artist.

In 1996, the Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal mounted a major exhibition of 27 paintings and thirteen etchings, covering Freud’s output to date. The following year the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art presented “Lucian Freud: Early Works”. The exhibition comprised around 30 drawings and paintings done between 1940 and 1945. In 1997 Freud received the Rubens Prize of the city of Siegen. From September 2000 to March 2001, the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt was able to show 50 paintings, drawings and etchings from the late 1940s to 2000 in a larger overview exhibition despite the artist’s considerable resentment towards Germany. All print media bore the motif of Freud’s outstanding painting Sleeping by the Lion Carpet (1995-1996) depicting the nude Sue Tilley. In addition to some of his most important nude portraits of women, the large-format picture Nude with leg up (Leigh Bowery) from 1992 was also shown in Frankfurt, which was removed in the Metropolitan Museum New York from the exhibition in 1993. The Frankfurt exhibition was realised in a personal dialogue between curator Rolf Lauter and Lucian Freud and is thus the only project Freud authorised in direct cooperation with a German museum. The conversations with the artist were made possible by Duncan MacGuigan from Acquavella Galleries New York. This was followed by a large retrospective at Tate Britain in 2002. In 2001, Freud completed a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. There was criticism of the portrayal in some sections of the British media. The Sun was particularly condemnatory, describing the portrait as “a travesty”. In 2005, a retrospective of Freud’s work was held at the Museo Correr in Venice scheduled to coincide with the Biennale. In late 2007, a collection of etchings went on display at the Museum of Modern Art.

Freud painted from life, and usually spent a great deal of time with each subject, demanding the model’s presence even while working on the background of the portrait. Ria, Naked Portrait 2007, a nude completed in 2007, required sixteen months of work, with the model, Ria Kirby, posing all but four evenings during that time. With each session averaging five hours, the painting took approximately 2,400 hours to complete. A rapport with his models was necessary, and while at work, Freud was characterised as “an outstanding raconteur and mimic”. Regarding the difficulty in deciding when a painting is completed, Freud said that “he feels he’s finished when he gets the impression he’s working on somebody else’s painting”. Paintings were divided into day paintings done in natural light and night paintings done under artificial light, and the sessions, and lighting, were never mixed.

In 2008 Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995), a portrait of civil servant Sue Tilley, sold for $33.6 million – the highest price ever at the time for a work by a living artist. At a Christie’s New York auction in 2015, Benefits Supervisor Resting sold for $56.2 million. On 13 October 2011, his 1952 Boy’s Head, a small portrait of Charlie Lumley, his neighbour, reached $4,998,088 at Sotheby’s London contemporary art evening auction, making it one of the highlights of the 2011 auction autumn season.

Freud died in London on 20 July 2011 and is buried in Highgate Cemetery. Archbishop Rowan Williams officiated at the private funeral.

On November 10, 2015 Freud’s 2004 painting “The Brigadier”, a portrait of Andrew Parker Bowles in his British Royal Army uniform sold for $34.89 million US at Christies in New York City, beating the $30 million US presale estimate for the work.