A newly confirmed portrait by Lucian Freud, "Man in a Black Scarf" (1939), has gone on public display for the first time at London's Garden Museum as part of the exhibition "Benton End: A Paradise of Pollen and Paint." The show celebrates the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, the bohemian art academy founded in 1937 by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, where Freud studied at age 17. The painting's authenticity was long contested—Freud himself denied making it when it was accepted for a 1985 Christie's auction—but was finally proven in 2018 when the school's attendance register was found in the Tate archive, confirming the sitter as John Jameson. The work appears alongside pieces by Morris, Lett, Joan Warburton, Elizabeth David, and Beth Chatto, with the exhibition's set design recreating the school's kitchen and dining room.
This matters because the portrait's confirmation and debut resolve a decades-long attribution dispute involving one of Britain's most celebrated painters, whose notoriously protective stance toward his oeuvre led him to destroy works he deemed inferior. The exhibition also shines a spotlight on the East Anglian School's influential but lesser-known legacy, highlighting its role in shaping Freud's early career and its broader impact on British art and garden design. The Garden Museum's ongoing restoration of Benton End, the school's second home gifted to the museum in 2021, underscores a growing institutional effort to preserve and reinterpret the site's cultural and horticultural history.