On Lucian Freud's London
by Simon Coates
Lucian Freud was a paradox. Prickly, fickle, and easily seduced by gambling and late night pleasures, the artist was also fastidious, reclusive and dedicated - contradictions that informed almost every relationship he conducted throughout his life. Relationships - with both people and places - loom large in his history.
Twice divorced, the artist maintained a series of illicit and complicated affairs throughout his life, fathering - according to some estimates - 30 children, of whom he recognised only 14, among them ‘Hideous Kinky’ author Esther Freud, novelists Rose and Susie Boyt, and fashion designer Bella Freud. 2022 marks the centenary of the birth of one of history’s most celebrated painters, and one of London’s most important artistic figures.
Grandson to Sigmund Freud, Lucian was born to an art historian mother and an architect father in Berlin in 1922. In 1932 the wealthy Jewish family fled the growing Nazi movement, landing first in Devon before moving to St John’s Wood in 1933, kickstarting in the process Lucian Freud’s lifelong, unbreakable relationship with London.
By the age of 17, Freud was already a gifted painter with an interest in Surrealism. He was also rebellious and easily bored. Showcasing a restlessness that would become characteristic over time, Freud expanded on the reputation for truancy he had developed at school by skipping classes during the short spells he spent at the Central School of Art and Goldsmiths College.
He preferred to expand his knowledge by studying paintings by portrait masters like Ingres and Holbein in London’s public galleries. The restrictions and rigours of formalised academia frustrated him. In 1993, he refused an honorary Oxford degree, noting that he was neither an Oxford graduate nor a graduate of any university.
Throwing off the constraints of education but committed to becoming an artist, Freud moved out of his parents’ home and into a nearby maisonette in Abercorn Place with painter John Craxton in 1941. He moved again two years later, this time into his first proper studio in Delamere Terrace in Paddington.
In a 2012 interview with the Evening Standard, Freud said of the place: “It was very modest, just 15 shillings a week immediately after the war. I stayed there as it became more broken down. Finally, they started knocking it down so I moved from number 20 to number 4.” In the book ‘Lucian Freud: A Life’, Martin Gayford described Freud’s move as “escaping the bourgeois ambience of St John’s Wood and his parents for the Dickensian depths of Paddington.”
Freud spent the early 1940’s exploring. He hadn’t yet found his familiar corporeal painting style, but he wanted his work to be “an intensification of reality” - inextricably linked to his existence as a human being. Life, for Freud, was painting - and vice versa. Courtesy of his family’s connections, he became absorbed in London’s high society. After several flings and dalliances - with both men and women - Freud married sculptor Jacob Epstein’s daughter, Kitty Garman, in 1948.
The couple set up home at Clifton Hill, Maida Vale, with Freud keeping Delamere Terrace as a place to paint. Freud’s work was beginning to appear as book illustrations and in group shows across London. In 1951, a breakthrough of sorts arrived when his painting, ‘Interior At Paddington’, was exhibited at the Festival of Britain. However, Kitty and Lucian divorced after four years. Two years later Freud married again, this time to writer Lady Caroline Blackwood.
Freud had been working as a painting tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art for several years when, in 1958, he began an affair with one of his pupils. Suzy Boyt is the subject of Freud’s 1959 painting, ‘Woman Smiling’, the artwork that marks the crucial turning point in the painter’s style: from workaday, awkward rendering to his trademark, impasto fleshiness.
Rose and Susie Boyt are two of four children that resulted from the affair. Freud and Lady Blackwood’s marriage lasted four years, with the painter moving back to Paddington as the union fell apart, eventually ending up at 227 Gloucester Terrace in 1967.
Even before he began flitting between north west London homes, Lucian Freud had fallen in love with Soho. An admirer of his work, Freud had engineered a meeting with Francis Bacon - already a painter on the rise - in 1944. Both came to delight in each other’s company, with Freud describing Bacon as the “wildest and wisest” person he had ever met.
Bacon showed Freud his favourite hangouts in what was once described by Darren Coffield as “Soho’s Bermuda Triangle: the French (House), the Coach & Horses and the Colony Room Club - a diabolical trinity where loved ones could enter, dissipate and not be heard of again...”. It was into this Triangle that Freud and Bacon disappeared, bouncing up and down Dean street’s drinking dens, sometimes ending up in Knightsbridge at the Kray Twins’ casino, Esmeralda’s Barn, to gamble hard.
Their friendship lasted across the decades, with both artists painting one another (in June 2022, Bacon’s ‘Study For Portrait of Lucian Freud’ sold for £43.3 million) but by 1982 the pair had fallen out after Bacon began ridiculing Freud’s work behind his back, calling his style “ghastly”.
The Hayward Gallery gave Freud his first major retrospective exhibition in 1974 and by 1977 he was living in the borough of Kensington, having taken an apartment in a Victorian townhouse in Holland Park. In 1997, he bought 138 Kensington Church Street. Although he kept the townhouse flat as a studio, Freud felt settled in Church Street, with the Georgian house’s first floor gradually becoming his preferred place to paint.
Freud’s fame grew. By the 1990s he was feted on an international scale. The New York Times dubbed him “the greatest living figure painter”. Born into wealth and a beneficiary of his grandfather’s will, Freud had never been without income, but gaming debts and general financial mismanagement often left him short. When Freud’s bookie Alfie McLean died in 2006, he’d amassed an artwork collection worth around £100 million. The collection consisted largely of paintings that Freud had given him to pay off his gambling debts.
By the 2000's, though, Freud’s artwork prices were dizzying. Cash was rolling in. In 2005, his portrait of a pregnant Kate Moss sold for £3.5 million. In 2008, his painting ‘Benefits Supervisor Sleeping’ sold for £21.2 million. The painting’s sitter, Sue Tilley, had been introduced to Freud by the performance artist Leigh Bowery, who he had painted in the early 1990's.
Once a week Sue shrugged off her day job at the Charing Cross Jobcentre to become the cashier at Bowery’s notorious Leicester Square nightclub, Taboo. It was to Bowery that Freud commented “Hitler’s attitude to the Jews persuaded my father to bring us to London, the place I prefer in every way to anywhere I’ve been.”
On July 20th 2011, Lucian Freud died in bed at his Kensington Church Street home, aged 88. Looking back over the numerous personal and professional connections he instigated and destroyed during his lifetime, there is a singular relationship that stands out as enduring and faithful: the one he had with London.
Simon Coates is a writer based in London.
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Paintings: Reflection with Two Children (Self-Portrait) / Interior at Paddington / Woman Smiling