The National Portrait Gallery on Tuesday revealed details of what will be a blockbuster, with more than 100 works filling most of the ground floor gallery space. The exhibition, the first major show to focus on Freud's portrait work, had been planned in close partnership with the artist, who died aged 88 in July. Lucian Freud's final work will be shown in a National Portrait Gallery exhibition opening February 9, 2011. The painting is an enormous and unfinished nude portrait of his assistant and close friend, David Dawson, with Dawson's whippet, Eli. The work will be shown for the first time and will feature prominently in the major 2012 exhibition covering seven decades of the artist's probing, distinctive portraiture. His final work was, said curator Sarah Howgate, "a commanding and affectionate" portrait of a man who had been the artist's assistant for 20 years.
