Why Lucian Freud hated having his picture taken

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). But looking at oneself and at another person are processes that are fundamentally dissimilar, both practically and psychologically. This puts his self-portraits, which are on show in an exhibition at the Royal Academy next week, in a separate category to the rest of his work.

Lucian disliked being the focus of attention — even refusing to turn up to his own private views — and hated having his picture snapped by strangers. One day in the mid-1990s I was having lunch with him at St John restaurant, when he suddenly stood up and started hurling bread rolls at another customer. It turned out he suspected this person — wrongly, as it happened — of taking his photograph.

This was paradoxical because, of course, he spent much of his time observing other people, in his studio and elsewhere. In restaurants he would quite frequently stare hard at a fellow diner. The recipient of this attention sometimes found it unnerving, especially as Lucian had a habit of raising his upper eyelid to see more clearly, which gave him the look of a bird of prey. A well-known chat-show host once told me that he found the Freudian scrutiny he had been subjected to in the Wolseley ‘terrifying’. But actually, Lucian was just sizing him up as a potential subject for a picture.