Freud was born in Berlin, Germany in 1922, son of Jewish parents Ernst Ludwig Freud, an architect, and Lucie née Brasch. He is the grandson of Sigmund Freud, brother of writer and politician Clement Raphael Freud and of Stephan Gabriel Freud, and uncle of radio and television broadcaster Emma Freud. Freud and his family moved to the U.K. in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism, and gained British citizenship in 1939.
Freud briefly studied at the Central School of Art in London then, with greater success, at Cedric Morris' East Anglican School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham, and also at Goldsmiths College - University of London from 1942-3. Thereafter, he served as a merchant seaman in an Atlantic convoy in 1941 before being invalided out of service in 1942. Freud's first solo exhibition, at the Lefebvre Gallery in 1944, featured the now celebrated The Painter's Room. In the summer of 1946, he traveled to Paris before continuing to Italy for several months. Since then he has lived and worked in London.
