Freud portrait ousts 'Ophelia' as most popular postcard

A postcard of a portrait by Lucian Freud has become the best-selling card at the Tate Britain Gallery.

Freud's Girl With A White Dog has overtaken Ophelia by the Victorian artist Sir John Everett Millais, which was the most popular postcard for the past decade.

Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, said the new favourite gained in popularity as a result of a three-month retrospective of Freud's career at the gallery which began in October last year. The painting – completed in 1951 – shows Freud's first wife, Kitty Epstein, with her right breast exposed and a dog resting on her leg.

Sir Nicholas said: "This shows how the British audience for contemporary art has grown. Millais's Ophelia is an arresting image, but Freud's Girl With a White Dog is perhaps more challenging."

Ophelia, painted 150 years ago, depicts Shakespeare's heroine in her final moments as she floats downstream. The Pre-Raphaelite work was part of Henry Tate's original gift to the nation, forming the basis of the Tate collection.

Paintings in the Freud retrospective ranged from Girl With Roses, completed in 1948 to Garden, Notting Hill Gate, painted in 1997. Other highlights were a series of portraits of his mother and portraits of the painters John Minton, Michael Andrews and Frank Auerbach.

Freud's subjects are often the people in his life. As he has said: "The subject matter is autobiographical, it's all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement really."