Martin Gayford

Why Lucian Freud hated having his picture taken

Martin Gayford remembers the painter once hurling bread rolls at a stranger he suspected of taking snaps of him

issue 26 October 2019

One of Lucian Freud’s firmly fixed views about himself was ‘I’m not at all introspective’. This was, like many opinions we hold about ourselves, both true and not true. Perhaps it was more that he did not want to look within: his gaze was directed outwards. Lucian had trained himself to see everything — animate and inanimate — without preconceptions (one of his anxieties was that his own feelings would leak into a picture and spoil it).

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