British painter Lucian Freud, who was one of the world's most revered and coveted contemporary artists, has died.
He was known mostly for his signature nudes and self-portraits.
A spokesperson for his New York art dealer said the grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, died at his home in London on Wednesday night. He was 88.
Freud was born in Berlin in 1922 to a German family who fled the Nazis for Britain in 1933 and became British citizens in 1939.
He attended a number of art colleges and had a brief spell with the merchant navy before turning to art and staging his first exhibitions in the 1940s.
His Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, a 1995 portrait of a nude, obese woman asleep on a sofa, fetched $US33.6 million at Christie's in 2008.
