Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.When Lucian Freud died in 2011, he dodged a bullet. Reputationally, it was perfectly timed, leaving before social media could decimate the artist’s sexual misadventures and questionable approach to parenting. In his dotage Freud was seen (or rather promoted) as the greatest living British painter, his standing heightened by his avoidance of publicity, a contacts book to rival statesmen and an illustrious familial back-story. The myth of the difficult genius seemed set. But Naked Portrait, a new memoir by Rose Boyt, one of the artist’s 14 (acknowledged) children, shows that the paint isn’t quite dry.The author, who has written several gritty novels of family life, is one of four children that Freud fathered with Suzy Boyt, one of his students at the Slade School of Art during the 1950s. “He told me he took the Slade job to get girls,” Boyt notes. The book opens with an illustration of the first of three paintings that Freud executed of Rose, painted in 1977 when the sitter was 18. It is an explicit nude. Boyt is pictured lying on a bed, her legs spread, one knee raised. The composition’s gynaecological focus is discomforting and sets the tone for many of the recollections that follow. Boyt has shaped her memoir around a diary of sitting, this time clothed, for the second portrait in 1990. Rose Boyt states that her elder half-sister Annie, who posed nude for her father when she was just 14, ‘no longer felt obliged to say he was inspirational’Entries from this volume, rediscovered by the author during a house clearance in 2016, are supplemented with present-day analysis of the events and traumatic memories of being abused in her childhood by another of her mother’s boyfriends and being raped by a friend of her brother. Writing novels, friendships and love affairs provide happier recollections. But the shadow of her father looms throughout. The result is a rambling account of a woman dealing with well-founded daddy issues.Freud’s character emerges through vignettes of early morning sessions in his studio in London’s Holland Park. As he paints, he talks of Rodin, Degas and Velázquez but just as enthusiastically about fellatio, buggery and visits to clinics for sexually transmitted diseases. “He felt I was more available for sex talk because he had sex with my friends,” explains Boyt. She conjures up a seedy castle-creeper — “my father was an expert on titles” — with disgusting habits: “The worst thing about Dad is his nose picking.”There are both mundane and outrageous details: Freud adores strawberry Häagen-Dazs, eats cold grouse for breakfast and loses some half a million pounds at the races. In a rare tender moment, Andrew Parker Bowles, Queen Camilla’s first husband, visits the studio and finds “the daughter of the great artist” scrubbing the floors. He tried “to make me feel important in case I was humiliated by my servitude”, recalls Boyt.Most of all, we see a daughter unsettled by a father’s inconsistency. The generosity — Freud buys her a flat — is offset by his using her as a mortified audience for his squalid stories of “having” women. Tellingly, the other key figure in the book is Boyt’s harried psychotherapist, Jonathan Bridges (who Freud calls a “venal sadist”). No doubt, great-grandfather Sigmund would have approved of the endless discussions about her dreams.In recent years, there has been a glut of books on Freud that has included numerous monographs and academic studies, his collected letters and a vast two-volume authorised biography by William Feaver. Increasingly, it appears, a separation is being made between the unsavoury character and the extraordinary art. In 2019, the artist Celia Paul wrote a memoir to correct the notion that she was simply Freud’s muse (she was another of his Slade students). And Boyt states that her elder half-sister Annie, who posed nude for her father when she was just 14, “no longer felt obliged to say he was inspirational”.Boyt’s depiction of her father is both subjective and changeable. “He never told me he loved me, maybe he didn’t love me, of course he loved me,” she writes. Two of Freud’s other daughters, the fashion designer Bella Freud and novelist Esther Freud, have more positive memories of sitting for him. And while this account describes an ogre in his lair, being horrid is not enough to get one cancelled when there is such a vast amount of money invested in an artist’s work. A similar conversation was had recently about Picasso’s legacy.Boyt’s addition to the already-crowded Freud shelf is hampered by structural flaws and a light editorial hand. It takes 200 pages to arrive at the sitting and the chronology is muddled. The book would have also benefited considerably from the inclusion of a family tree and an index. Where this meandering memoir succeeds, however, is in its tart portrayal of a man with an insatiable desire to despoil and sully, whether it be a plate of cakes, a friend’s composure or a sitter’s best side, and the effect that vandalism had on others. Naked Portrait: A Memoir of Lucian Freud by Rose Boyt Picador £22, 416 pages Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen
