The Value of the Human Image: Legacy and Identity in the School of London

As four significant paintings by Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff circulate again through exhibition and sale, they prompt a broader reflection on how art assigns value to the human image. In an era still shaped by upheaval and mediation, these works insist on the body as a site of memory and identity. Their renewed visibility invites audiences beyond the market to reconsider the lasting cultural force of figurative painting.

The grouping spans four decades and three distinct temperaments: Francis Bacon’s Self-Portrait from 1972; Lucian Freud’s A Young Painter (1957–58) and Blond Girl on a Bed (1987); and Leon Kossoff’s Children’s Swimming Pool, 11 O’Clock Saturday Morning, August 1969. Seen together, they chart a history of postwar Britain through flesh, paint and lived experience.

The School of London was never a manifesto-driven movement. It coalesced instead around proximity — Soho pubs, studios in South Kensington, friendships and rivalries that unfolded over decades. Bacon and Freud reportedly saw each other almost daily for years, while Kossoff and Frank Auerbach pursued parallel, equally intense investigations of paint and place.

LEON KOSSOFF
Children’s Swimming Pool,
11 O’Clock Saturday Morning,
August 1969
Estimate: £600,000–800,000

What united them was less style than conviction. At a moment when American abstraction and European conceptualism were reshaping the art world, these artists remained committed to the figure. Their surfaces were thick, worked and reworked. Their subjects — lovers, friends, children at play — were unidealised. In place of purity or detachment, they offered contingency and exposure.

Bacon’s 1972 self-portrait sits at the emotional core of the group. The year was marked by the death of his partner, George Dyer, and Bacon responded with a sequence of small, unsparing self-images. In this canvas, the face appears twisted and unstable, as though caught between dissolution and defiance. Flesh is streaked with pinks and bruised blues; the eyes are displaced, the mouth compressed into a nervous fold. It is a portrait that feels less observed than endured.

The painting’s exhibition history has cemented its status as one of Bacon’s most incisive self-scrutinies. That it once passed directly from the artist to his doctor, after a period of personal turmoil, underscores the proximity between lived drama and painted image.

Freud’s A Young Painter captures a different kind of turning point. The portrait of Ken Brazier marks a shift from the taut linearity of Freud’s early work toward a more tactile, physically engaged handling of paint. Influenced in part by Bacon’s belief in the expressive charge of a single brushstroke, Freud abandoned fine sable brushes for coarse hog’s hair and began to stand at the easel, leaning into the canvas.

The result is a face that seems to press outward from the surface. Brazier’s features are smeared and weighted, yet intensely present. Freud’s gift lay in making paint function almost as skin — recording fatigue, insecurity and resilience in equal measure. In doing so, he expanded the psychological range of portraiture at a time when the genre was often dismissed as conservative.

Blond Girl on a Bed, painted three decades later, extends that inquiry into the tradition of the reclining nude. Freud consciously placed himself within a lineage stretching back to Titian and Velázquez, yet the result resists classical ease. The model, Sophie de Stempel, lies exposed on a bed, her body rendered with a dense, almost sculptural accumulation of pigment.

Freud preferred to describe such works not as nudes but as “naked paintings” — images in which self-consciousness and vulnerability are palpable. The flesh is neither smoothed nor idealised; it bears weight and gravity. In an era increasingly saturated with mediated images of the body, Freud’s insistence on duration — months of sittings, prolonged scrutiny — reads as a countercultural act.

Kossoff’s Children’s Swimming Pool introduces a wider social field. Painted in 1969, it belongs to a series depicting a north London public pool, a site the artist frequented with his children. Where Bacon compresses and Freud isolates, Kossoff expands. The canvas teems with bodies in motion, rendered through thick impasto and restless marks.

Yet the painting is less about spectacle than about atmosphere. Light shifts across water; sound seems to reverberate through the painted surface. Kossoff, who had earlier depicted bomb sites and rebuilding projects, here turns to an ordinary scene of leisure. In doing so, he suggests that modern life — even at its most mundane — carries epic weight when filtered through memory.

What makes this quartet significant now is not only its market visibility, but its reminder of what figurative painting achieved in the second half of the twentieth century. These artists reasserted the body as a site of truth at a time when technology, war and ideology had rendered it precarious.

They also shaped subsequent generations. Contemporary painters have acknowledged their debt to the School of London’s commitment to flesh and psychological immediacy. The persistence of figuration in today’s global art scene owes much to this earlier refusal to abandon the human form.

As these works move once more into the circuits of display and ownership, they carry with them layers of time: Soho in the 1950s, the upheavals of the 1970s, the changing face of London’s streets and swimming pools. They remind us that value in art is not measured solely in estimates or auction headlines, but in the capacity of paint to hold memory — and to return, decades later, still charged with the urgency of being alive.