Later career
Freud painted fellow artists, including Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon and produced a large number of portraits of the performance artist Leigh Bowery, and also painted Henrietta Moraes, a muse to many Soho artists. A series of huge nude portraits from the mid-1990s depicted the very large Sue Tilley, or "Big Sue", some using her job title of "Benefits Supervisor" in the title of the painting, as in his 1995 portrait Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, which in May 2008 was sold by Christie's in New York for $33.6 million, setting a world record auction price for a living artist.
His collaborations with Leigh Bowery was one of the most productive. These portraits of the obese Bowery stand as Freud's response to his own previous series of naked women, for Freud has shunned the ideal at almost every turn and yet still managed to convey beauty and simplicity. Amidst this series, Freud was given a major retrospective by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1993). Mark Swart, in the fourth edition of Contemporary Artists, wrote that this show "brought to a head a long-standing debate surrounding Freud's approach to the figure. His advocates view him as an inheritor of a tradition that includes Watteau and Ingres, painters who managed to capture the elegance of the human form without losing its earthly qualities, while his opponents dismiss him as a skilled draftsman too mired in solipsism and egomania to express anything other than a monotone conception of depressing and humiliating sexuality."
The notion of Freud's solipsism has dogged him throughout his career but he belies this: "[Professional] models would have some idea of posing in itself—which is exactly what I'm trying not to do. I want them to be themselves. I don't want to use them for an idea I've got. I actually want to do them. Even their identical twin wouldn't do at all."
Earlier that year, the reclusive Freud—he seldom traveled from London—had refused an honorary degree from Oxford, claiming he was neither an Oxford graduate nor a graduate of any university. He was simply, as art critic Robert Hughes declared, the greatest realist painter of his time.
Freud's most consistent model in his later years was his studio assistant and friend David Dawson, the subject of his final, unfinished work. Towards the end of his life he did a nude portrait of model Kate Moss. Freud was one of the best known British artists working in a representational style, and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1989.
His painting After Cézanne, notable because of its unusual shape, was purchased by the National Gallery of Australia for $7.4 million. The top left section of this painting has been 'grafted' on to the main section below, and closer inspection reveals a horizontal line where these two sections were joined.
In 1996, the Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal mounted a major exhibition of 27 paintings and thirteen etchings, covering Freud's output to date. The following year the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art presented "Lucian Freud: Early Works". The exhibition comprised around 30 drawings and paintings done between 1940 and 1945. This was followed by a large retrospective at Tate Britain in 2002. In 2001, Freud completed a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. There was criticism of the portrayal in some sections of the British media. The Sun was particularly condemnatory, describing the portrait as "a travesty". In 2005, a retrospective of Freud's work was held at the Museo Correr in Venice scheduled to coincide with the Biennale. In late 2007, a collection of etchings went on display at the Museum of Modern Art.