Pluto, 1988

About the Work

The etching shows the artist's faithful greyhound as close as possible: slumbering and relaxed, nestled against the woman lying behind him. "I like people to look as natural and as physically at ease as animals, as Pluto my whippet," Freud said in an interview, describing the undisguised creatureliness that also fascinated him in his human models. At the advice of his artist friend Frank Auerbach, Freud had the plate cut so radically that the female figure ends surprisingly just above the shoulder. The left front paw of the greyhound was cut from the beginning. By depicting the scene so clamped between the edges of the plate, the message of the picture focuses not only on the sleeping dog, but especially on the intimate relationship between man and animal, which is expressed in the mutual touch: the woman's hand on the dog's back, the dog's head on the woman's foot. The etching, which the artist partially tinted grey by hand, is thus perhaps one of Freud's most intimate prints.