etailed with almost photographic accuracy. But the hair sits helmet-like on the immense head with its huge, staring eyes and extremely pale skin. The details of the face are carefully painted with a delicate glossy look to the lips and every hair of eyebrows and eyelashes visible. This curious disjuncture between the head and the rest of the picture creates an uneasy sense of imbalance that is not, as Danto noted, pleasant.
These works also initiated one of Freud's most persistent habits, that of withholding the names of his sitters in the titles of the pictures. The large-eyed woman is his first wife Kitty Garman, the daughter of sculptor Jacob Epstein. Throughout his career Freud's subjects have usually been "people with some specific relation to the artist as friends, lovers, daughters," but they nearly always remain anonymous (Hughes, Fat 75).
In the early 1950s the glossy surfaces were retained but Freud's interest in painting flesh can be seen to emerge. In the remarkable portraits of Francis Bacon (1952) and John Minton (1952), the fi
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