During my exploration of the Lucian Freud exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, I entered a room of a series of portraits illustrated by Freud of his mother in her later years. Three portraits were featured, and the final portrait stood out to me with its title, “The Painter’s Mother Dead.” In the accompanying description, it explains Freud’s choice to create one final portrait of his mother shortly following her passing. Freud states, “After years of avoidance there came a time that I could be with her, and I thought that I should do so. Doing her portrait allowed me to be with her.”

In 2019, my grandpa passed away. On the morning of my high school graduation, my grandpa was taken to the hospital. That evening, I went to the hospital to surprise him in my graduation cap and gown. It was during this visit that we were informed he had been diagnosed with cancer. A month later, he passed away. This was my first exposure to death with someone very close to me. 

Prior to his diagnosis, I had begun working on a portrait of my grandpa that I had hoped to give him on his 90th birthday later that summer. When he passed, it was too painful to work on the portrait. I was not even sure if it had a purpose in being completed. However, after a year had passed, I decided to return to the portrait. As I worked to complete it, I used it as an opportunity to bring closure to my grief and, as Freud eloquently stated, to be with my grandpa for a few more moments. 

When I read Freud’s quote, I felt an immense shared experience with my grandfather’s portrait. The portrait of him evolved into a spiritual experience that provided closure and transcended an artistic exercise of trying to recreate his likeness through portraiture. To the left is the portrait I illustrated of my grandfather.

I am further reminded of a reflection upon death by Clarissa Dalloway in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. The quote reads, “It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death. Perhaps - perhaps.”

My interaction with my grandfather’s portrait and Freud’s study of his mother following her passing both serve as examples to Clarissa’s transcendental theory. The unseen piece of us that might survive is certainly found in the intimacy of portraiture. In this way, people can experience a form of immortality as others look at their portrait and receive a glimpse into who they were and their expression of character.