From The Inside Out — 10 Scenes From The Artist’s Window

As people everywhere attempt to come to terms with the new reality, we explore how great artists of the past communicated their feelings about the world beyond their windows — and, on occasion, their sense of detachment from it

Following the death of his architect father, Ernst L. Freud — himself the fourth child of Sigmund Freud — in 1970, Lucian Freud (1922-2011) began to paint terraced houses and factories. In Waste Ground, Paddington, created that same year, Freud depicted the debris outside his studio window with the same intimate scrutiny that he applied to his nudes and portraits. 

‘I was very conscious as I looked out of the window at the back that more and more people were leaving and that it got emptier and emptier,’ he recalled later. Over the next two years, the artist would find respite from his grief in these seemingly mundane views.