“Lucian Freud: The Self-Portraits” opens with two works that bookend the painter’s career in reverse-chronological order: Self-Portrait, Reflection (2002), a late self-portrait in the vigorous, fleshy style for which Freud became best known, and Man with a Feather (Self-Portrait) (1943) in the detached, precise style that defined his first mature period.

The works in this section of the exhibition were executed over just three years. Man with a Feather (Self-Portrait) (1943) represents a defining moment in Freud’s early artistic maturity; he exhibited the painting at his first solo exhibition in London in 1944. This work, along with Man with a Thistle (Self-Portrait) (1946), evinces Freud’s short-lived interest in Surrealism and exemplifies his early detached style, built up with precise brush strokes (applied with a fine sable brush) into enamel-like surfaces.

Although Freud was a rebellious youth, his artistic talent was recognized and supported by his family. He attended a number of art academies in London for short periods, but preferred spending time in the city’s bohemian Soho district. Between 1939 and 1942 he attended the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Suffolk, where he cemented his intention to become a painter. There he completed Self-portrait (1940), painted in a tight close-up that displays an early interest in conveying flesh. The illustrated letters here are also from this period.

Freud drew obsessively from childhood onward. By the late 1940s, his drawings feature an increasing graphic sharpness, explored with linear economy in pencil, crayon, or pen and ink. Drawn self-portraits such as Flyda and Arvid (1947), Street Scene (1948), and Self-portrait as Actaeon (1949) were conceived as book illustrations. Freud rarely drew preparatory sketches, and his sketchbooks installed in this gallery are neither systematic nor chronological. Instead, they served as tools of exploration in a range of media, with varying degrees of finish and scale.

Around the mid-1950s, Freud turned his attention from drawing to painting, and for several years stopped drawing altogether. Hotel Bedroom (1954) is the last painting Freud made while sitting down at an easel, close to his sitter with the canvas on his lap. Soon after, he decided to paint standing up. One of only a few double portraits wherein Freud depicts himself with another figure, Hotel Bedroom turns his psychologically charged observations onto his own marriage to Caroline Blackwood, his second wife.

Between the late 1950s and mid-’60s, Freud’s handling of paint gradually opened up as he prioritized exact observation over the use of symbols and suggestions of narrative. His friendship with fellow British painter Francis Bacon proved particularly influential, inspiring Freud to switch from soft sable-hair brushes to more rigid hog-hair ones, which can handle more paint. Freud’s technique is laid bare in his unfinished Self-Portrait (about 1956): he would draw a loose charcoal outline and build up the image directly with paint, starting with the face and working outward.

Man’s Head (Self-Portrait I) (1963) is one of three self-portraits Freud executed in rapid succession around his 40th birthday. Explicitly realist but densely packed with gestural passages, the portrait gives emphasis to structure rather than likeness with a thick impasto that becomes almost masklike. Freud no longer depicts himself contained within vertical and horizontal planes, but sets himself free against an abstracted background. His expression appears in turns direct, challenging, and skeptical.

Freud preferred to paint his likeness with the use of mirrors, rather than from photographs. He attributed his preference in part to the quality of light and left mirrors lying around his studio to find unexpected angles and perspectives. Reflection with Two Children (Self-Portrait) (1965), Interior with Hand Mirror (self-portrait) (1967), and Interior with Plant, Reflection Listening, (Self-portrait) (1967–68) exemplify Freud’s innovative use of mirrors to not only capture his reflection but also to underscore the mediated nature of self-portraits.

Throughout his career, Freud held a succession of London studios in the Paddington, Holland Park, and Notting Hill neighborhoods. They provided the stage for his encounters with sitters—each an intimate environment that was also erotically charged. We glimpse its elements: the battered chair, floorboards, and walls, which add a psychological dimension to Freud’s portraits.

The deep shadows and angular planes of light in Reflection (Self-Portrait) (1985) suggest that this painting was executed at night. Freud captures his averted gaze, as though lost in a moment of distraction. He renders the folds of skin through an extraordinary modulation in his brushwork. The surface application of Cremnitz white, a heavy paint that gives a granular, luminous texture evoking skin when mixed with other colors, gives shape to the ridge of his nose and his forehead.

Freud continued to paint self-portraits into the 1980s, developing more straightforward spatial compositions with his head and shoulders in close-up. They display great self-possession and a mastery of color, form, light, and shade. During this period, he became internationally renowned for works of startling intensity and for frank, often disquieting nudes, developed through intense observation, with sittings lasting weeks and months, requiring models to sustain poses for prolonged amounts of time. Freud stated it was only fair that he should subject himself to the same process.

Even when depicting other subjects, Freud delighted in finding subtle ways to indicate his presence. He smuggles his image into corners, reflections, or the backgrounds of unfinished paintings, as in Two Irishmen in W11 (1984–85). In Flora with Blue Toenails (2000–2001) the shadow of the artist’s head looms over the sitter’s bed with a sense of overbearing proximity and erotic foreboding. The palpable discomfort of the model raises questions about the uneasy power dynamic between painter and subject that suffuses some of Freud’s work.

Freud’s late self-portraits are increasingly built up with thick layers, by turns smoothed and scratched, as though responding to changes in his physical appearance. They acquire an existential dimension and introspective in mood. Among the latest works in this exhibition, Self-Portrait (2002) and Self-Portrait, Reflection (2002) are unflinching, melancholic portrayals of the then-80-year-old artist. The emotional weight of Freud’s encroaching decrepitude is apparent in the artist’s guarded posture. His attention to sagging skin represents an admission of fragility, yet also a courageous confessional that registers the stubbornness of life.