Lucian Freud, widely acknowledged as one of the greatest, most influential and yet most controversial British painters of his era, has died at his London home. 
 
 News of his death, at the age of 88, was released by his New York art dealer, William Acquavella. The realist painter, who was a grandson of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, had watched his works soar in value over recent years and, in 2008, his portrayal of a large, naked woman on a couch – Benefits Supervisor Sleeping – sold at auction for £17m, a record price for the work of a living artist. 
 
 Born in Berlin, Freud came to Britain in 1933 with his family when he was 10 years old and developed his passion for drawing. After studying at art school, he had a self-portrait accepted for Horizon magazine and, by the age of 21, his talent had been recognised in a solo show. He returned to Britain after the war years to teach at the Slade School of Art in London. 
 
 Over a career that spanned 50 years, Freud became famous for his intense and unsettling nude portraits. A naturalised British subject, he spent most of his working life in London and was frequently seen at the most salubrious bars and restaurants, often in the company of beautiful young women such as Kate Moss, who he once painted. A tweet from the writer Polly Samson last night reported that Freud's regular table in The Wolseley restaurant was laid with a black tablecloth and a single candle in his honour. 
 
 The director of the Tate gallery, Nicholas Serota, said last night: "The vitality of [Freud's] nudes, the intensity of the still life paintings and the presence of his portraits of family and friends guarantee Lucian Freud a unique place in the pantheon of late 20th century art. 
 
 "His early paintings redefined British art and his later works stand comparison with the great figurative painters of any period." 
 
 Acquavella, described him "as one of the great painters of the 20th century". 
 
 "In company, he was exciting, humble, warm and witty. He lived to paint and painted until the day he died, far removed from the noise of the art world." 
 
 The son of an architect and older brother of broadcaster Clement Freud, the painter was married to Kathleen Garman for four years. They had two daughters. His second marriage, to Caroline Blackwood in 1953, ended in 1957. The novelist Esther Freud and the fashion designer Bella Freud are his daughters from a relationship with Bernardine Coverley. 
 
 Curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Starr Figura summed up Freud's divisive quality. "The ones who don't appreciate him find his work hard to look at and a bit out of step with what is going on in the rest of the world. They have a hard time categorising it." 
 
 One of Freud's most often reproduced paintings is of the Queen, who posed for Freud fully clothed. The brightly coloured portrait was donated to the Queen's collection and is one of the most controversial depictions of the monarch. 
 
 Art critic and presenter Tim Marlow said Freud was a "very special man". 
 
 "He looked at the world was as if he was painting it but when you saw his paintings you saw how he really saw it," he said. 
 
 "He was the sort of person who had a twinkle in his eye but he would also look at you in a daunting and scrutinising way. 
 
 "He was very funny and very dry. He never lost his sharpness." 
 
 Viewpoint 
 
 Lucian was the most hilarious man I'd ever met. I met him briefly at a club with [mutual friend] Leigh Bowery, and then he took me to lunch at the River Cafe. There were a group of us and he told a joke about how a whale wanks, complete with movements. 
 
 A few weeks later he asked if he could paint me. Leigh had already put the idea into his head, so it wasn't a surprise. The first picture was done at night. I'd go after work and he'd paint till 1 or 1.30 in the morning, and it was agony lying there on the floor. First Leigh was in the picture, then he went to Scotland and one of Lucian's whippets took his place. 
 
 The next three paintings were in daylight, which was better. I'd arrive, we'd have some breakfast and a chat in the kitchen – that was the bit I loved, the setting up. Lucian was a good cook: he used the best ingredients and did very little to them, gorgeous bread, gorgeous fish, cooked plainly. Then he'd say: "Sue, perhaps you could wash those dishes – I think you use that green stuff in the corner." We'd leave them to pile up. He had a cleaner who came three times a week. 
 
 He would paint with us both facing the canvas, so he'd look at me and then turn around to paint. I trained to be an art teacher, so it wasn't all new to me, but I'm very shoddy, very slapdash, and it taught me that it is real work: each painting took nine months, and he was seeking perfection right up to the moment he finished. 
 
 There was a big break between paintings because I went on holiday to India and got a tan, which he hated beyond belief: we had to wait till it was gone. Every picture he painted was to test himself, to do it in a different way. 
 
 Sometimes he was very chatty, sometimes he was very quiet – I always thought he should have been on the telly. He'd say terrible things about people, but he never saw that he was really rude. I was always a bit jealous: he did exactly as he pleased. He was funny, miserable, horrible, kind, mean, generous, every character trait mixed up in one person. 
 
 The last time I saw him was about two years ago at his birthday party, at Johnnie Shand Kydd's house. Someone told me he and I had fallen out, which I didn't know, so I was a bit nervous about seeing him. I was shaking when I went up to say hello, and had I offended him, but he said "Of course you haven't", and patted me on the head. 
 
 I was lucky to spend time with someone who cared so much, and who worked so hard. He wasn't cruel – he painted what he saw. What strikes me most is, I look at my fat ankles and my fat feet every morning and I think they look just like that painting. Even the skinny girls don't look good, do they? He painted out of love. 
 
 Sue Tilley, model for Benefits Supervisor Sleeping ||||| In a time when other artists spilled their paints on the canvas, Lucian Freud carefully wiped his brush after every stroke. He painted intense, disturbing realist portraits even when representational art was deemed passe. He took months or longer to finish a work, but it took critics and collectors years to catch up to him. 
 
 FILE In this June 24, 2011 photo, visitors look at Lucian Freud's work entitled 'Woman Smiling' during a photo call at Christie's in London, Friday, June 24, 2011. Lucian Freud, a towering and uncompromising... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE In this Oct. 29, 2007 photo, people look at a painting by Lucian Freud entitled, '"Boy Smoking ", dated 1951-2., part of the Simon Sainsbury Bequest unveiled at the Tate Britain gallery in London.... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE In this May 3, 2007 photo, Christie's Head of Post War & Contemporary Art, Pilar Ordovas looks at a Lucian Freud 1992 painting 'Bruce Bernard' on display at the auction house in London, Lucian Freud,... (Associated Press) 
 
 A towering and uncompromising figure in the art world for more than 50 years, Freud died late Wednesday night in his London home, his New York-based art dealer said Thursday. He was 88. 
 
 Spokeswoman Bettina Prentice said that Freud died after an illness, but didn't give any further details. 
 
 He painted "until the day he died, far removed from the noise of the art world," his dealer, William R. Acquavella, said in a statement. 
 
 Freud's unique style eventually earned him recognition as one of the world's greatest painters. His paintings command staggering prices at auction, including one of an overweight nude woman sleeping on a couch that sold in 2008 for $33.6 million _ a record for a living artist. 
 
 "He certainly is considered one of the most important painters of the 20th and 21st centuries," said Brett Gorvy, deputy chairman of the postwar art department at Christie's auction house in New York. "He stayed with his figurative approach even when it was extremely unpopular, when abstraction was the leading concept, and as time moved on his classic approach has proven to be very important. 
 
 "He fought the system and basically won." 
 
 A grandson of Sigmund Freud, a leading pioneer of modern psychoanalysis, Freud was especially known for his nudes. He meticulously revealed every flaw, creating an intimate, unflinching level of detail that sometimes leaves viewers uncomfortable. 
 
 "He has certainly divided critics," said Starr Figura, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 
 
 "The ones who don't appreciate him find his work hard to look at and a bit out of step with what is going on in the rest of the world. They have a hard time categorizing it," she said. 
 
 "I think his work is very charged, and it is quite disturbing to look at," Figura said. "That's what gives people a problem and that's what gives his work power and fascination. His work is incredibly personal, and that comes through. On the other hand it is also very detached and critical and that is what makes it so intense." 
 
 Gorvy said Freud painted long hours every day, even in his late 80s, in a sustained bid to complete his life's work. 
 
 "He lived and breathed his art," he said. "For someone who was so successful, he was extraordinarily regulated in his day, with three main sittings a day and some at night. He worked each and every day to this very tough regime. He was very aware of his own mortality and he knew his time was very, very precious." 
 
 Born in Berlin in 1922, Freud moved to London with his parents Ernst and Lucie Freud in 1933 after Hitler and the Nazis rose to power in Germany. 
 
 He was naturalized as a British subject six years later and spent almost his entire working life based in London, where he was often seen at fashionable restaurants, sometimes with beautiful younger women, including the fashion model Kate Moss, whom he painted nude, and other luminaries. 
 
 He was at the height of his fame in the last decades of his life, when he still continued to paint for long hours at his studio in London's exclusive Holland Park. He was even named one of Britain's best dressed men by the fashion magazine GQ when he was well into his ninth decade. 
 
 Among his most famous subjects was Queen Elizabeth II, who posed for Freud fully clothed after extensive negotiations between the palace and the painter. The colorful portrait, which the artist donated to the queen's collection, remains one of the most unusual and controversial depictions of the British monarch. 
 
 "It makes her look like one of the royal corgis who has suffered a stroke," said Robin Simon, editor of the British Art Journal. 
 
 Other critics said more enthusiastically that the work had broken the staid mold of royal portraiture. 
 
 In his studio, Freud worked extremely slowly and deliberately. People who posed for Freud said it sometimes took him months or years to complete a portrait because of his attention to every tiny detail and the complex nature of his brushwork, which gave his paintings a lifelike intensity. 
 
 He sometimes spent entire days mixing paints without putting a brush to canvas. When he did finally paint, he would wipe his brush on a cloth rag after every stroke. Great piles of rags lay on the floor of his studio and eventually he began to incorporate the rags into some of his paintings. 
 
 Freud often painted his friends, relatives and fellow artists. Others were simply ordinary people who received a small daily fee for posing for Freud. He usually refrained from using professional models because he felt they brought artifice into his studio. 
 
 His 1950-51 portrait of his first wife was to remain one of his most famous and best loved works. The detail of her features, the shadows in the room and her partial nudity are typical of the nuance and frankness of much of Freud's work. 
 
 Nudity became a central feature of Freud's art. Painting people without their clothes, he believed, peeled away their outer layer and helped reveal their instincts and desires. 
 
 "I'm really interested in people as animals," he told curators at the Tate Britain museum in advance of a major show in 2002. "Part of my liking to work from them naked is for that reason, because I can see more ... I like people to look as natural and as physically at ease as animals." 
 
 His first solo exhibition was at the Lefevre Gallery in 1944 after a brief stint working on a merchant ship during World War II. After the war, Freud left London for several years to paint primarily in France and Greece. 
 
 On his return in 1948, he started showing his work regularly at various exhibits and taught art at several schools. 
 
 His first major retrospective exhibition appeared at London's Hayward Gallery in 1974 to critical acclaim. Further retrospectives appeared in Paris, Berlin and Washington between 1987-88 and in 2002 at London's Tate Britain museum. 
 
 Freud's work can be found in major public collections around the world, including the Tate Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 
 
 In 1998, prominent art critic Robert Hughes described Freud as "the greatest living realist painter." 
 
 Despite the accolades, he kept trying to improve his work even as the end of his life neared. 
 
 "I think the most dangerous thing for an artist would be to be pleased with one's work simply because it is one's own," he once said. "One wants every picture to be better than its predecessors. Otherwise, what's the point?" 
 
 The painter feuded for many years with his late brother Clement Freud, a popular writer and broadcaster who died in April 2009. He did not attend Clement Freud's funeral. 
 
 Freud's marriage to Kathleen Garman lasted four years and was dissolved in 1952. They had two daughters together. His second marriage, to Caroline Blackwood in 1953, ended in 1957. 
 
 Prentice, the spokeswoman, said in an email that funeral arrangements had not yet been made public. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Karolina Tagaris and Raphael G. Satter contributed to this report.
– Acclaimed British painter Lucian Freud has died Wednesday night after a long career that saw him hailed as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Freud, grandson of the psychiatrist Sigmund, moved to Britain from Berlin as a child when his family fled Nazi Germany. He became famous for his often unsettling portraits. His "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping," a portrait of a large naked woman on a couch, set a record for a work by a living artist when it sold for $33.6 million in 2008, the Guardian reports. "He certainly is considered one of the most important painters of the 20th and 21st centuries," a chairman of Christie's tells the AP. "He stayed with his figurative approach even when it was extremely unpopular, when abstraction was the leading concept, and as time moved on his classic approach has proven to be very important. He fought the system and basically won." Freud, who was 88, "painted until the day he died, far removed from the noise of the art world," his dealer says.