Reflection (Self-portrait), 1985 by Lucian Freud is seen in this handout photograph released by the National Portrait Gallery in London September 20, 2011. London's National Portrait Gallery will stage a major Lucian Freud exhibition next spring which the artist collaborated on up until his death in July. “Lucian Freud Portraits” runs from Feb 9 to May 27, 2012, and among the exhibits will be Freud's final work “Portrait of the Hound 2011”. - Reuters Photo

LONDON: The final painting completed by Lucian Freud before his death in July will go on show for the first time at London's National Portrait Gallery in February 2012, the showroom said Tuesday.

The unfinished “Portrait of the Hound 2011” depicts Freud's assistant David Dawson posing nude with his dog Eli.

Freud was working on the painting shortly before his death, aged 88, on July 20.

The work will form part of a show being billed as the “most ambitious exhibition of the artist's work for 10 years”.

It will display more than 100 paintings and works on paper, including some of Freud's earliest studies executed in the 1940s.

Freud helped the gallery plan the “Lucian Freud Portraits” show for many years before his death.

“The National Portrait Gallery is delighted to bring together so many outstanding portraits created by one of the great artists of our time,” said National Portrait Gallery director Sandy Nairne. “Lucian Freud painted people with an inquisitive brilliance.”

Freud, a grandson of Sigmund Freud, the inventor of modern psychoanalysis, was widely seen as Britain's top contemporary artist.

He was known for his signature nudes and self-portraits such as the powerful 1993 work of himself as a naked older man waving his brush like a weapon.

In recent years his paintings have sold for astronomical sums. His 1995 portrait “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” fetched 33.6 million dollars at a Christie's auction in New York – a world record for a living artist.