The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  ‘It got out of hand and the police warned me. I wanted to paint one of the twins and the other said no.’

  In 1968 Ronnie Kray went to Broadmoor, the asylum for the criminally insane, and Reggie Kray to an ordinary maximum-security prison. ‘Ronnie wrote to me from jail. “We’ve got a boy here: Francis would love him. He’s good at painting … Would you do something for him?” I didn’t reply; I never knew them very well. I wasn’t really properly connected.’ Years later Reggie Kray heard on Radio 2 that two Freud paintings had been sold for £2.5 million; which reminded him that in the old Esmeralda’s Barn days ‘he offered, as an act of friendship, to paint a portrait of my late wife Frances and me. For various reasons,’ he added, ‘we never got round to doing it.’2

  Then there was the Killer. Freud knew him by repute long before he met him through Charlie Thomas (‘a gangster for Billy Hill, a very bad gangster as he couldn’t bear bullying, which is what they did’) who, as a friend, warned him to watch what he said ‘Not so much of that “Killer” stuff.’ Villains are snobs. The Killer was marginally amused that the Krays claimed his crimes as theirs, as they had to have people afraid of them. He would say, ‘Anything I done, the Krays took credit for it.’ The Killer, Eddie Power, was a real killer. ‘Shot a man who had a private bank in Park Lane. A friend of his put some money in there – you could get cash day and night for a small extra sum – and the man took it, spent it, and the Killer went up to him in the street, in daylight, and shot his legs off. He became an art dealer in the art boom.’

  ‘The Killer had a car showroom south of the river, in Wandsworth somewhere, on a roundabout, and there was a car smash, and a man was thrown against the showroom window and his severed leg was lying on the ground, and Eddie shouted at him for making a mess. Villainy wasn’t quite the point. He said, “Lucian, I don’t do them stupid things now.” Probably he didn’t. He was never inside as there was no motive and nothing could be proved. He did moneylending. With moneylending with interest, you weren’t allowed to get late. People were frightened. I never asked him for money. The thing is, everyone knows that people who bet aren’t serious about money. Even with banks, it’s difficult to get the tiniest overdraft if you don’t regard money as the holiest substance.

  ‘The Killer had lots of money and wanted things of mine, such as a painting I did of Charlie. He was small and quiet. A psychopath. Blotchy. Bad indoor complexion. Like quiet people do, he did imitations. He had a house near the Lefevre in Bruton Street and Thomas Hardy’s house in Westbourne Park Road. I gave him some Hardys once. “You never tell me where you live, Lu,” he said. His elder brother hanged himself in the house in Westbourne Park Road and the Killer made the room a kind of shrine. I went there, had some tea, and the Killer’s wife, who was quite old, produced the wrong kind of bread. “It’s all I’ve got,” she said and he shouted at her. He once invited me to a party and all the guests were murderers and had done at least fifteen years inside. They all knew each other, and I knew these names from the News of the World. Eddie said, “If you fancy a girl, Lu, let me know. I don’t want misunderstandings.” I didn’t go again.’

  Lordly about money matters, loftily discriminating in that he came to prefer a Bentley to a Rolls (meanwhile complaining that it cost him more in parking charges than the rent of his flat) and took to appearing in Savile Row grey flannel suits nattily dishevelled, Freud enjoyed being as distinctive among the Killer’s cronies as he was among the writers and politicians in Ann Fleming’s drawing room, where menaces went no further than backbiting. ‘Gore Vidal threatened to have me bumped off at Ann Fleming’s. He started talking to me the way he does and I said, “How’s the other tart?” (i.e. Truman Capote). “I’ve had people rubbed out for less than that,” he said. He considered himself irresistible then.’

  Freud the predator was more restless than obsessive, not the fox in the chicken run but the jockey and racehorse going all out. Work was dominant and when the going was good it absorbed him entirely, but still he pursued distractions. Once locked on to these, whether amorous or risk-taking, there was no diverting him.

  Man’s Head (1960) – the final painting of Charlie Lumley – was reproduced, free of commentary, in X.3 The pert or sly or glowering boy had become a tousled young man approaching middle age and thinking of settling down, maybe. He now qualified as the longest-serving sitter and was about to get married. Over the previous sixteen years or so Charlie had been on call, intermittently, and had been caught at every phase from street urchin to accomplice to incipient family man. Freud let him have the use of the room in Delamere Terrace for the wedding party. A recklessly generous gesture in Frank Auerbach’s view, since Freud himself was absent. ‘Surrounded by Lucian’s unfinished pictures, these on the whole villains would be celebrating a wedding. It seemed to me an act of enormous courage.’ No harm came of it.

  During a dinner at the Café Royal in May 1958 to celebrate an exhibition of Cecil Beaton’s Neo-Edwardian My Fair Lady designs, Freud and his table companions, the Duchess of Devonshire and Lady Lambton, Belinda Lambton – whose husband was to renounce his title of Earl of Durham a decade later – took to pelting the noted hostess Elsa Maxwell with bits of bread roll, mock violence being the done thing when bored, or the least they could do to assert a dislike of rampant cod poshness.

  Freud had known ‘Bindy’ Lambton since the war and had been involved with her to varying degrees from the mid-fifties; she was noted for having been expelled from eleven schools altogether; married at eighteen she had five daughters and an ebullient reputation. By June 1960, when he went up to County Durham for a ball given by the Lambtons at Biddick Hall on their estate, their lively friendship was long established and a painting of her begun; for quite a while one resort for afternoons spent with the children was her house in South Audley Street; he, Annie and Annabel went for lunch and afterwards watched racing, wrestling and Juke Box Jury. ‘I saw Bindy quite a lot. Did quite a few paintings.’ They were open enough about the relationship to be seen holding hands in the street. He stayed at Biddick a number of times, taking the children (he painted a small picture of Annabel in bed there wearing a frilly nightdress) and went riding in the grounds; also at another Lambton house, Fenton near Berwick-upon-Tweed. What he saw of the unprosperous North-east was limited. ‘Went to Whitley Bay. It’s a fishing place and the difficulty was that there were a few enormous catches in the summer, nothing otherwise, so Tony [Lambton] – he was MP for Berwick – built them a fish-canning factory or something; but it was a hopeless thing of glut and dearth, such a desperate place for people with hard lives to make their Côte d’Azur. I remember seeing people in very faint sun taking their clothes off. Amazing white under red necks. I swam too. If you can swim in the Regent’s Canal you can swim anywhere.’

  An afternoon out at Whitley Bay was not the limit of his travels with Bindy Lambton. ‘She was very good at making plans and going to restaurants, and we went to see pictures over a period.’ The pretexts were rewarding but the journeys didn’t always go to plan. They drove across France to Basel and thence to Isenheim in Germany to view Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, only to find it was actually in Colmar, Alsace. In those days one could open for oneself layer upon layer of triptych to reveal glut and dearth, St Anthony, the Virgin and glaring demons behind the Christ nailed up, skin punctured and bruised, putrefaction setting in. ‘Loved the flesh but no influence,’ he said. He had read about Grünewald in J.-K. Huysman’s Là-bas: ‘He was the most uncompromising of realists, but his morgue Redeemer, his sewer Deity, let the observer know that realism could be truly transcendent.’

  One jaunt was arranged by John, Earl of Wilton. ‘Bindy and I went with him for a gourmet tour of the chateaux of the Loire starting at the Ritz in Paris. With a chauffeur: safer that way. The only condition he imposed was “please don’t try and pay for anything”. John Wilton could do leisure well. He once referred to his “lunch hour”, but he never had a job of any kind; he bought things and left them behi
nd when he left and moved into smaller houses; we got on very very well. He was interesting on social history: broadly the topic What Family Are They? He knew all that.’

  ‘We welcome the 1960s,’ wrote Quentin Crewe as editor of Go, a glossy magazine launched in February 1960 as a sort of Horizon for ‘a new age. The age of travel for everyone; the age of comfort and leisure. And we are the people living in this wonder age. As we point out a little frivolously on page 21 – YOU ARE THE JET SET!’ He recommended the Prado (‘One of the most famous paintings, Goya’s La Maja Desnuda, is reproduced in colour’, pp. 58–9); not that Freud needed any such prompt: Bindy’s energy swept him along. On further expeditions she drove as a rule and they went away for up to a week or so. ‘I went with her to Castres, the Goya Museum, and Montpellier, where Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet and the portrait of Baudelaire are, and those Géricault limbs. Spent two days there. I looked at the Courbets a lot: Les Baigneuses, that marvellous nude going into the forest, like a rugger player pushing off others, lots of foliage, and the woman beside her, one stocking off, one at her ankle. I like Courbet. His shamelessness. But not the hack things. Since I hadn’t his ability or facility, my paintings went wrong slowly.’

  Back in London Bindy sat for him, bare-shouldered, her long head lodged in the corner of the green sofa, hair sprung from the parting, brush marks going with the flow. Next, seated voluptuously upright, she scooped the hair back and, arms braced, thrust her chest out emphasising an eighteen-inch waist. He found that when he painted her with her arms behind her head she could maintain the pose for hours; that made her his most athletic sitter; that is, until Leigh Bowery in the 1990s. ‘She was a spectacular shape, famous for it. She was a very good sitter, had this amazing discipline over her hips.’ Another head was completed from forehead to lips and then abandoned. Bacon told him he should keep it; so instead of destroying it he sold it.

  If Freud could not paint the Viscountess as naked as a Duchess of Alba he could suggest as much. In Head on a Green Sofa, nakedness from the shoulders downwards is implied. Complicity enveloped these pictures. He did a small painting of her son, Ned Lambton, born in 1961, the frowning baby face as quickened as a Bacon mugshot, but tenderly so. ‘I was going to do a nude, a back view. I wanted to do the joke idea of Bindy like the Courbet of the woman walking away, a walking nude. I didn’t do it because Tony Lambton made rather a fuss. I wrote him quite a strong letter about it. I said I thought it very bad assuming I was in some way degrading her. I think it was to do with conventional ideas of marriage, to do with licence and a long lead. People have a horror of looking ridiculous. If their wife has another life, it is not what they require. But surely, as Auden said, being laughed at is the first sign of sexual attraction? Tony bought the pictures: got the lot, four for £1,000. Including Portrait Fragment. I think he fancied the idea of being a patron.’ When in the early seventies – by then Under Secretary of State for Defence – Lambton was exposed by the News of the World for a tryst with three dominatrix prostitutes at once, his response, besides resigning, was: ‘People sometimes like variety. It’s as simple as that.’

  After an interval of nearly thirty years Freud painted Bindy Lambton and her formidable composure once again, in 1991, dubbing her Woman in a Butterfly Jersey. As her obituary in the Daily Telegraph in February 2003 said, she was ‘never a martyr to the humdrum’. An accident with a go-kart and another with a lorry on the A1 set her back for some years.

  In the summer of 1962 a Frans Hals exhibition in Haarlem was the pretext for several days in the Netherlands. They stayed in Amsterdam, ‘the Dome Hotel: bathroom down the passage’, Freud remembered. Hals he loved for what he saw as the good-natured way his sitters, Married Couple in a Garden for example, suit one another, heads and hands animating such exquisitely sober dress. ‘The colour doesn’t bother one; the fact that colours aren’t done as blue, green, yellow and red: nonetheless they are nothing to do with monochrome. Degas said, “I wish I had done my work in black and white.”’ This rich blackness – “colour-for-black-and-white”, as art editors would have it – was not understatement but a voluptuous reticence. ‘Hals’ amazingly fluid and immediate way of painting for a lot of people rules out his sense of life, which was of life absolutely fraught with warmth and with feeling. When people talk about his vulgarity they are really talking about his vitality, an element that time hasn’t been able to kill off. They still shock people very much.’

  That the brilliance of Hals was lost on people like Henry Moore and the critic Geoffrey Grigson, who agreed with one another that Hals was the eminent artist they most disliked, could only make him even more admirable as far as Freud was concerned. ‘I think it’s a marvellous idea making them all look like that. I mean they are all talking, eating, grinning, doing all these things – I think of Shakespeare a bit – done from a kind of detailed – and not all that detailed – observation. I think that’s what people mean when they go on about the technique – people playing the piano and crossing their hands – but I don’t see that any more.

  ‘His exuberant notation, when he lights up something or twists something, never an unnecessary mark. I exclude The Laughing Cavalier which is probably not Hals as far as I am concerned. (Or perhaps it’s the only Hals.) The marks of embroidery: this side of dapper.’

  With Hals it is often possible to gauge the speed of application. Flecks of light on the seams of clothing or the eye socket of a skull were set down in rhythmic strokes of the loaded brush, four or five at a time, exercising empathy over and above showy technique. For Freud this was encouragement, incitement indeed, to strike out regardless of Bacon and his growing array of recipes for spontaneity.

  Epstein once told Freud about the difficulty he’d had making a portrait bust of Anne Cavendish’s husband, Michael Tree: ‘He said, “I found it quite hard because of his moustache. And then I thought of Frans Hals.”’

  A new edition of London Labour and the London Poor, Henry Mayhew’s comprehensive survey of lowly occupations, originally published in three volumes, appeared in 1949, and was republished in 1951 – its centenary year – by Paul Hamlyn’s Spring Books as Mayhew’s London. Freud had been aware of this treasury of bygone lives before then. Mayhew, a founder-editor of Punch magazine, took statements from his subjects, ostensibly verbatim, allowing each of them a voice and recording a more authentic individuality than the quirkiness that passes for character among Dickens types. Fascinated with the zoology of trades and occupations and pecking orders among the lowest of the low, he exposed the lives of sewer-rat hunters (‘the rats is wery dangerous, that’s sartin’), Chelsea bun sellers, costers, coster girls (‘the lads is very insinivating and will give a girl a drop of beer, and make her half tipsy and then they makes their arrangements’), Punch and Judy showmen, dog thieves and ‘pure’ (dog shit) finders, whose gleanings were used by tanners. Mayhew listed every variety of old clothes men, such as: ‘A Jew clothes man is seldom or never seen in liquor. They gamble for money, either at their own homes, or at public-houses.’ They were not to be confused with rag-and-bone men, one of whom had handled pictures of one sort and another: ‘For pictures I’ve given from 3d to 1s. Pictures requires a judge.’ The Mayhew rendition of a street photographer’s patter particularly appealed to Freud who used to recite it when asked about portraiture: ‘People don’t know their own faces. Half of ’em have never looked in a glass half a dozen times in their life, and directly they see a pair of eyes and a nose they fancy they are their own.’

  For Freud there was appeal in the way Mayhew’s London Poor talked; verbally they were as fresh as anything; the illustrations, based on daguerreotypes, reminded him of the Bewick wood engravings he had worked from in Glass Tower days; their stiffness conflated the self-consciousness of the individual and the anonymity of the specimen. Combined with what the characters had to say for themselves, these were stirring and resounding portraits, part Daumier, part Hals.

  Their presumptive successors, the modern characters in The
Big City or the New Mayhew, published in Punch from the mid-fifties and in book form in 1958, were more fictional: ‘Street Boys’, ‘Moving Picture Girl’, ‘Exile’, ‘Sellers of Ice-Cream’. Drawn by Ronald Searle and written up by Alex Atkinson to miserable or at best poignant effect, their lives were acted out in graphically decrepit settings. Freud had no desire to treat people as representatives of their class or occupation. Nor was he a dramatist, summoning up telling figures in the manner of Beckett or Pinter. Nor, working from Charlie Lumley, Charlie Thomas or Harry Diamond, did he label them Petty Criminal, Former Gangster or Soho Character. Some might be minimally described (Red Haired Man, Woman with Black Hair, Young Painter) and a few were named, artists mainly. Yet these descendants of Mayhew’s Londoners were made constituents of recorded history by process of scrutiny, by being painted. This was how Freud was to put portraiture on a freshly demanding footing. To be able to paint anyone, from any background, was liberating. ‘When I painted Harry, Jacob [Rothschild] came in and Harry couldn’t believe it that he, Harry Diamond, had met a Rothschild.’

  The only regular in the Old England who was willing to sit was the man from a shop under the arches of the concrete bridge, the Ha’penny Bridge, on the far side of the canal. Freud was to begin a painting of him (Scrap Iron Merchant) in 1968, wearing a beret, two red stripes laid in either side of the head. ‘I did a drawing, a head, illustrative a bit. He was quite friendly. I used to put bets on there, as he had a phone, and used it for a long time. They liked me saying “it’s my office”. Scott they were called, half Jewish (very strong Jewish half), prosperous in their way, a lot of lorries coming and going. People tried to sell them lead off roofs but they weren’t fences. I got my paint rags from there, five shillings a huge bag.’ Annie Freud remembered being taken there: ‘The rag-and-bone shop under the bridge. Huge fat men, bales of clothes and smell of sweat. Constantly seeing Dad tell stories, then watching him flirt with Diana Cooper or Judy Montagu, Diana’s friend, or sneer at Cecil Beaton.’4