The frontispiece of this book is Lucian Freud’s portrait of his daughter Rose naked on a bed. Rose says that when her father asked her to sit, which she had long hoped he would do, she naturally assumed he would want her naked, but asked him not to paint her hairy legs. He, in turn, asked her to remove her mascara, but she refused. When she saw the canvas she was shocked at how much it focused on her vulva, but she did not object. She sat for him at night – he had other sitters during the day – and he sometimes gave her purple hearts to keep awake. When the portrait was finished, she took on the task of cleaning Freud’s studio, which ‘made me feel special, downtrodden, and loved for all the wrong reasons’.
Rose was born in 1958, 18 months after her brother, Ali. Freud had met their mother, Suzy Boyt, while she was a student at the Slade and he was a visiting lecturer, but Suzy was expelled when she got pregnant for the second time. Freud didn’t attend Rose’s birth, but turned up a couple of hours later with two live lobsters which he expected Suzy to cook, even though she was allergic to shellfish. He registered himself as the father on Rose’s birth certificate, but never suggested she take his name. For a long time Suzy hoped he would marry her, but of course he didn’t, and although he visited the children occasionally they never cohabited.
When Rose was seven her mother fell in love with a German sea captain called Uwe and they all lived on a cargo ship in the Baltic before moving to Trinidad. Rose later wrote a wonderful book about this experience, but didn’t reveal the full extent of the abuse she suffered at Uwe’s hands. They were repatriated from Trinidad when the boat sank, but Uwe reappeared when she was l4 and tried to rape her. Years later she was shocked to be told at a psychological assessment that she was suffering from childhood trauma. ‘To admit that I was traumatised is a giant step. I have always felt I had no right to mind anything that happened to me.’
She was at art school when she started sitting for her father and later went to UCL to read English. She had a variety of jobs –shop assistant at Viv Westwood’s Seditionaries, DJ, door girl at the Café de Paris. In 1984-5 she was one of a team running warehouse parties in King’s Cross, which were popular with the local sex workers. But a gang called Millwall F-Troop came round demanding protection money, so she acquired a bodyguard, ‘some bloke from Bermondsey who had appointed himself to stand by me all night’. One night he told her: ‘I am your brother.’ She said she was touched by his loyalty but he explained no, he really was her brother – one of four children Freud had by Kay McAdam, an art student, at much the same time he was having Ali and Rose by Suzy. Rose later rang Kay, who said she only had very casual relations with Freud but that every time she did, she got pregnant. Rose’s experience of suddenly finding a whole new set of siblings echoes that of Freud’s eldest daughters, Annie and Annabel, by Kitty Garman, who grew up thinking they were his only children.
Rose suffered terrible anxiety in her early twenties and was sent to the Tavistock for psychiatric assessment. She was awarded two years’ treatment on the NHS with a psychoanalyst called Bridges and made great progress, but when the two years were up, she had to ask her father to pay for further sessions. She was afraid he’d refuse, because he had a deep contempt for psychoanalysis, perhaps because it was invented by his grandfather, but anyway he agreed. Between early morning sessions with Bridges and late-night sittings for her father, Rose had little free time; but she managed to establish herself as a writer, at first for the London Review of Books, and then as a novelist.
As she moved into her thirties she increasingly lamented her childlessness. She loved looking after other people’s children and was happy to babysit for her many friends and siblings, but she assumed that she would never have children herself because no one would love her. Then one day, visiting a friend, she met Mark Pearce, whose wife had died and left him with a son to bring up. Soon they were going out, and within a year they were married. Freud was resentful at first, but paid for their wedding, and included their new baby, Stella, in his portrait ‘The Pearce Family’.
By then Rose had obviously earned her father’s respect because, towards the end of his life, he made her his sole heir and executor. In theory, she could have pocketed his entire fortune, but Freud rightly trusted her to distribute his estate fairly among the 14 children he acknowledged. She consulted lawyers, of course, and asked David Dawson, Freud’s longtime assistant, what he thought she should do with his papers. In the end, she gave them to the National Portrait Gallery, along with his drawing books, in lieu of tax.
Soon after her father died, Rose found her old diaries which were the origin of this book. At first she thought she’d just write about sitting for her father but in fact Naked Portrait has ended up as something much bigger than that – a dense (sometimes too dense) account of a girl growing up and gradually coming out from under her father’s shadow. At first she is in awe of him, he can do no wrong, but slowly, slowly she begins to see his faults. He is still a genius, but now he is also a fallible human being, who has a nasty habit of picking his nose in front of her – ‘he seems to need an audience’ – and, worse, telling her much more than she wants to know about his sex life, including his visits to the VD clinic.
Boyt writes beautifully; even so, I found this book difficult to read because of the welter of names, the to-and-fro chronology and the lack of an index. Several times I had to turn to William Feaver’s The Lives of Lucian Freud to check basic facts. Rose would be horrified. She is surprisingly venomous about Feaver and says she has not read his biography, ‘because I would rather not hear my father’s distinctive voice parroted by the author in some muddled and mean-spirited imitative act’.
Naked Portrait is certainly not mean-spirited, but it is quite muddled, and I would have been grateful for a chronology and a cast of characters. But then Freud, with his passion for secrecy, would not have approved. He always liked the idea of keeping some mystery intact.
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