d, of which I was rather proud" (quoted in Spurling). In 1939 he began to attend the East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting, run by Cedric Morris. Though he briefly ran off to join the Merchant Navy he was invalided out a few months later and return to Morris' school where he continued to draw incessantly.
Freud had drawn constantly as a young child and since the age of 12 his parents, though not Freud himself, had believed he would be an artist. His early influences seem clear. His memories of the family's home in Berlin include plates of Dnrer watercolors depicting tangled grass and the famous crouching hare. And the "fixedly staring, ultradetailed" art of the German master was his first major influence (Hughes, Fat 75). Under Morris the elegant linearity of his early inspiration received encouragement. Morris' own style "with its flat, wide-eyed, head-on approach" was heavily influenced by the Neue Sachlichkeit, or new realism, of German painting in the 1920s (Spurling).
Memories of Dnrer surface occasionally throughout Freud's career, as in the incredibly detailed mass of plant life in Two Plants (1977/80) and the sleeping whippet in Double Portrait (1985/86). But the stylistic influence of Morris and the new-realist Germans had a more limited run when, after a brief flirtation with Surrealist motifs, Freud initiated his first personal painting style. These works were portraits with "glazed surfaces and somewhat unpleasantly stylized persons" of whom the most prominent is the very large-eyed "girl" of works such as Girl with Roses (1947/48) (Danto 104). There is a peculiar contrast in this painting between the nearly obsessive realistic details of her clothing and the stylized detailing of her head. The green-striped black sweater and the black velvet skirt are painted with immense skill and the contrasting blacks and dissimilar textures of the clothes can be readily seen in a reproduction. The hair too is d...