It’s like reliving happy times with my father all over again,” says the writer Esther Freud, looking at the pictures of her younger self currently on show in London for the centenary of her late father Lucian.
“I love it when he has an exhibition. It makes him feel very present.”
Lucian, lambasted as well as praised for his brutally candid portraits and as famous for his louche lifestyle as his art, was also a loving if unconventional father. He had 14 children and painted at least nine of them, just for the pleasure of spending time together. His subjects included the great and good — the Queen and Lord Rothschild hang alongside Freud’s artist contemporaries Auerbach, Hockney and Bacon on the walls of a major new retrospective at London’s National Gallery.
But Sigmund Freud’s grandson reserved his tenderness for the family, “inhabiting perhaps the two most important spaces in Freud’s life: his studio and his canvas”, according to Daniel F. Herrman, curator of the National Gallery show.
The affectionate double portrait of Esther with her sister Bella, which she is so happy to revisit, is one of the star exhibits.
“It was so much fun doing it; it’s very evocative of the three of us in the studio together,” says Esther, who first sat for Lucian aged 16. Later the studio sessions helped out with money when she was a struggling actress.
“He painted me five or six times. In the early days he’d give me money for a cab, which was much more than the fare. I would take the bus home instead of a cab, and he knew that.”
Painting the girls, lounging on his comfortable old leather sofa over the months running into years it took to complete the picture, was Lucian’s idea of a family outing. “He was very entertaining to spend time with anyway, and he made sure it was a real pleasure to sit for him. There would be a lot of laughter, and afterwards we’d go out to supper or pick things up from the deli.”
These fun moments contrast sharply with the difficult ones she wrote about in Hideous Kinky, the book that was made into a film telling the tale of the two young sisters fending off hunger in Morocco, where their mother took her and her sister as small children. “It left me with a sense of adventure, but it wasn’t exciting when my mother ran out of money and had to beg — it was horrible.”
Once back in England and settled at school in Sussex, where her mother worked as a dinner lady, she was able to build a relationship with her father. Lucian, who told his biographer he had little interest in babies and small children, hadn’t been with her mother since she was born. “My first vivid memory is when he came to visit when I was seven, driving a big, expensive car. He was glamorous, elegant and from a different world.”
As she entered her teens, Esther and Lucian were close — “Bella used to take me up on the train to see him” — and for her 18th birthday he gave her a £100 note. “It was more money than I had ever seen, and typical of the way my life has veered between such extremes.” By the time of his death in 2011 they were seeing each other two or three times a week.
“We children formed a roster to make sure someone visited him every day, taking him out to eat or bringing in food he liked when he wasn’t well enough to go out, and playing records.”
Lucian designed the cover for Hideous Kinky and for other books by his children. The intensity of these family relationships is only hinted at in the National Gallery, where the double portrait is supplemented by two more of Bella and likenesses of three other daughters and a son.
Sigmund Freud in 1938 with grandsons Anton (left) and Lucien
It is, however, explored in much more detail at the Sigmund Freud Museum in Hampstead, currently showing an intimate, insight-packed exhibition, The Painter and His Family.
“There was so much to tell about Lucian’s relationship with his own parents and his closeness to his grandfather as well as lesser-known portraits of the children to show,” says the museum’s events manager Jamie Ruers.
It includes a 1992 portrait of Esther that has never been seen before in public. “I had forgotten about it — like most of his pictures, it vanished into a private collection via my father’s dealer, because he always needed money,” she says of her gambler father,and the last, very tender picture he pictured of her breastfeeding one of her three children: “It’s mainly breast, arm and baby!” she says of Esther and Albie, one of the few works in which she features which she has managed to remain close to.
The show also highlights Lucian’s tenderness towards horses, dogs, even plants — he was fascinated from childhood by all kinds of wildlife, and included horses and plants in the childhood drawings he made for his father Ernst before they became estranged.
Ernst, who raised his family in Berlin before fleeing for London with them in 1933, disapproved of Lucian’s artistic aspirations. There is tenderness in these crayon scribblings as well as the birds celebrated in death whose portraits hang in the National Gallery, as carefully painted as the images of friends, family, lovers and the powerful people he felt so drawn to as subjects.
This last category is exemplified by the Queen, who is said to have enjoyed sitting for his controversial portrait of her, which, despite its tiny size, takes central stage at the new retrospective. Freud was accused of depicting her as an unsmiling bruiser when the unflattering painting was unveiled in 2001; his daughter calls his interpretation “honest”.
There are echoes of the way we have been talking about the Queen when you hear Esther ruminating about her father, who lived until he was 88. “I did realise he would die one day, and it made the time I spent with him after he became ill very precious, but I thought he would go on for a very long time.”
The more difficult aspects of family life are hinted at in Lucian’s relationship with his mother, Lucie. Frank Auerbach recalls Lucian confessing his mother’s suffocating devotion to him as her favourite child “rendered it impossible for him to have so unconditional a relationship with any other woman”.
Despite alienating himself from Lucie for 30 years, Lucian felt he could and should finally try to get to know her after she was widowed in 1970.
She lost all sense of purpose after losing the husband she had nursed devotedly, and fell into a deep enough depression to attempt suicide. “After years of avoidance there came a time that I could be with her, and I thought I should do so,” Freud recalled later, adding, “Doing her portrait allowed me to be with her.”
It was a very social mission; he would collect her from her home in St John’s Wood and take her to breakfast in Marylebone High Street before bringing her to his studio, where she sat for him more than 1,000 times before her death in 1989. For more than two years, after he moved studios, that involved her climbing five flights of stairs to his new Holland Park atelier.
The urge to paint or draw her more than 30 times did not stop with her death; Freud sought permission from the hospital where Lucie died to depict his mother on her deathbed, producing a charcoal drawing that is one of the most moving in the National Gallery show.
Between them, the two exhibitions shed light on what drove this painter who was much-maligned in his early career, even after being selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1954.
“The reviews in the British art press were disparaging,” says art historian Christina Kennedy, noting that even in 1987, by which time he was drawing the crowds in London galleries, reception was “less than fulsome” for his first major international retrospectives in Washington DC and Berlin, the city of his birth. But by the time of his death many considered him the greatest portrait artist of the 20th century.
That he was a warmer and more encouraging father than he felt his own very critical father was to him is suggested by having inspired a crop of so many creatives — the 14 offspring number artists and writers as well as a poet and an internationally renowned designer.
The youngest, Frank Paul, chose a very different career — he is a professional quizmaster, and will stage a pub quiz at the Sigmund Freud Museum in December. It’s one of many events the museum has arranged to allow the children to celebrate Lucian in their own way.
“It was their idea — so many came forward to say they wanted to do it,” says Ruers. Esther and Bella are among those who will talk about life with their unconventional but entertaining father in the coming months. Meanwhile, all 14 children have been given a special slot to see the work together soon after this month’s National Gallery opening.
Lucian Freud: New Perspectives is at the National Gallery until 22 January
The Painter and his Family is at the Sigmund Freud Museum until January 29
