‘Living in a dump and going out to somewhere palatial’
Marie Paneth’s Branch Street, a vivid sociological study of child life in a London slum street, identifiable from her descriptions as Clarendon Crescent W2, just up the road from Delamere Terrace, was published in July 1944. It focused on gangs of boys and girls aged four to fourteen, habitually fighting, wrecking, thieving, and with whom the author – an Austrian settled in London and a painter by training – tried to cope by operating rudimentary Play Centres in abandoned houses and a public shelter. Unlike Young Children in War-time by Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud, an account of ‘child development and psycho-pathology’ from the same publisher, her Branch Street reported with a degree of appalled fascination on ‘a queer urge to break, to spoil and to besmirch’. Feral behaviour was the norm there. ‘Disastrous evenings left us in queer depths of despair, when hasty fights, stealing and lewdness overshadowed our small periods of constructive activity.’1 The wariness and hostility of these children of prostitutes, coal shovellers and railway porters, she observed, was occasionally alleviated with touching spurts of trust. Freud, who at twenty-two was not much older than some of Mrs Paneth’s leading hooligans, saw at least one or two of them as potential sidekicks. For him there were parallels to be drawn with the juvenile leads in Emil and the Detectives: Gustav with his motor-horn, little Tuesday and the Professor, street-gang characters whose nicknamed resourcefulness matched that of the players in Damon Runyon’s Guys and Dolls.
‘My guide to a side of Paddington life was Charlie who lived next door at number 19. He was under fourteen then and he used to sleep in shelters. He wandered along the balconies, along the terrace, into my room. There was one of these bombing raids, and then he suddenly seemed to sort of belong to me.’ Charlie Lumley said that his first encounter with Freud arose out of his habit of clambering on to the balconies, and whenever the retired greengrocer next door spotted him he would say ‘Bloody cat burglar!’ as a joke. ‘Lu moved in and heard this – he was standing there with John Craxton – and that’s when we first met.’2 To the Lumleys their new neighbour was as poor as they were. ‘He never had a penny and my mother used to make him a sandwich and that. She would say “Pop this in to Lu,”’ Charlie remembered.3 He became attached to Freud, who drew him as an Artful Dodger sitting expectantly on his sofa and in an armchair wearing the red and blue uniform jacket, several sizes too big, from Still Life with Chelsea Buns, the ring on his finger and Brylcreemed hair denoting street savvy. ‘Going down the street he’d shout “You’re a goer” at a girl who’d been going with Yanks. He went to the Coliseum, the fleapit on the Harrow Road, and when I asked if he’d liked the film he said, “I couldn’t watch. There was a GI sitting next to me and his wallet was sticking out and I just couldn’t concentrate.” The only low life Charlie had was to do with his thieving. He used to get caught and I had trouble getting him off because in Police Courts they always read out your record. His first sentence was when he was fourteen. He’d built himself a boat on the canal, rowed up to the back of a vegetable shop and flogged the veg lower down the canal.’
Charlie had several brothers and a sister whom Freud took out once to L’Étoile. He asked her what she would like to drink and she said, ‘Cuppa tea please.’ The next day Charlie asked him when was he going to marry her. Charlie appealed to him. ‘He did funny imitations, made me self-aware. He had a real kind of quality.’
Earlier in 1944 Freud had approached galleries hoping to be invited to exhibit properly somewhere. ‘I had asked Erica Brausen (as everyone wanted to show at the Redfern, it was so lively) to see some paintings at Abercorn Place and she hummed and haahed and said, “Oh, Rex’s lumbago is too bad for him to get up the stairs”; so then, within days of my arranging it, [Duncan] Macdonald came from the Lefevre and offered me a show instead. I think on the strength of the Drumnadrochit drawing. And of course immediately then I got a telegram from Erica: “Rex will come any day now.”’ Rex Nan Kivell was the owner of the Redfern Gallery.
Craxton having just had his show at the Leicester Galleries, Freud’s debut at the Lefevre came a close second. The gallery had been bombed out of its King Street premises and reopened at 131 New Bond Street, upstairs from Beale & Inman the shirtmakers, with separate rooms for each exhibitor: Freud, Felix Kelly who did soft-focus bespoke paintings (‘The Lefevre Gallery, on Mr Kelly’s behalf, will be pleased to accept commissions to paint Country Houses’) and Julian Trevelyan, formerly a Surrealist and camouflage fabricator in the Western Desert, whose gouaches of West Africa he himself described as ‘African tarts and mammies in their brilliant clothes’.4 To differentiate himself from such associates, Freud decided to have his own eye-catching private-view card. ‘I did something that was fairly unusual for an unknown: I did the card myself and had it printed myself. I didn’t want to be on the card with Trevelyan and Kelly. I did a drawing of a crab and it was designed by Anthony Froshaug, a boyfriend of my cousin Jo at the Central. He taught typography. Older than me, very odd: he’d had a bad time in the Merchant Navy being abused. Had a thing about queers. It didn’t occur to me – the word – since all the people I knew were queers.’
Private view invitation, 1944
The crab was not exhibited, for Freud included only drawings that he considered equivalent to paintings. Several of the most recent he signed and dated. A few had to be borrowed – Ian Phillips lent Cacti and Stuffed Bird, Ernst Freud Juliet Moore Asleep and Craxton Quince on Blue Table. This was his opportunity to demonstrate, and edit, his broadening and intensifying accomplishment.
The private view – his first and, until his final years, the last he ever attended – was on a Saturday afternoon, 21 November 1944. Two young painters of ‘distinguished families’ were exhibiting, the Evening Standard reported, Trevelyan being the great-grandnephew of Lord Macaulay and nephew of G. M. Trevelyan, the historians, and Freud ‘the 21-year-old grandson of Sigmund Freud and Miss Anna Freud’s nephew’. Freud, the Standard added, had been co-editor, in his teens, of a Surrealist magazine called Bheuaau, which explained the Surrealistic tendency of his pictures: ‘an extraordinary variety of live and dead animals ranging from “A Skinned Hen” and “An Oil-Bound Puffin” to a stuffed zebra’s head, one of the chief ornaments of Freud’s studio over the Regent’s Canal’.5
According to the Standard ten of the drawings and paintings – about a third of the show – sold on the opening night. Freud was embarrassed. ‘All my relatives turned up and shamed me by buying things.’ His mother had been alerting family and friends. Cousin ‘Wolfi’ Mosse picked a dead-chicken drawing and Anna Freud’s companion Dorothy Burlingham bought the large Conté drawing of the palm tree that served as the design for the covers of The Glass Tower. Other buyers included Ian Gibson-Smith, Anton Zwemmer, whose bookshop-gallery in Charing Cross Road had for years aired the avant garde and who bought Quinces for fifteen guineas, and Wilfred Evill, a solicitor and collector (the legal guardian of Honor Frost, Freud’s acquaintance from the Central) who chose the drawing of Charlie Lumley seated on the studio couch. Lorna Wishart took The Painter’s Room, at fifty guineas the most expensive painting, and Colin Anderson, chairman of the Orient Line, went for one of the cheapest, the eight-guinea Mouse in a Hand.
Freud hung around the gallery. ‘I went and saw the show a lot. It was very much “yes, look what I can do.”’ Tuberous fingers and staring eyes were what he could do particularly well, also earlobes, feathers and claws, pelt and leaf. He was pleased to see that he had style and, unlike Craxton, more than style. He had application. His patience tracing individual strands of hair, where Max Ernst would have dragged a comb through the paint, was phenomenal and most lapses into facility were redeemed by sudden brilliance: the glint in the eye of the dead rabbit. A drawing of Craxton, done just in time to be exhibited (he dated it ‘22.11.44’) featured what he saw as ‘that narcissistic look’ through breathless attention to the zigzag texture of the jacket and the cultivated parting in the hair; this drawing caught the eye of L. S. Lowry, who had been taken on by the Lefevre and liked anything that smacked of Rossetti. Later on he bought it.
There were a few mentions (among them David Sylvester in Tribune) and two reviews. In the Listener John Piper addressed himself to Freud’s technique. ‘His youthful mannerisms add up to a personality. Too many of the forms are depressed by having to deliver unimportant literary messages, but he has a cultivated feeling for line, when he can be bothered with it, and a natural feeling for colour.’ Coming from an artist who in his own work tended to deliver architectural messages in startlingly heavy weather, this was heartfelt comment. Michael Ayrton, heady still with Neo-Romantic vapours (‘a sense of pain provoked my painting of Gethsemane in Wiltshire …’), wrote loftily in the Spectator: ‘The human figure defeats him because he does not observe it as he does dead birds but merely lets his pleasant line wander trickily round the form without relevance to construction.’6 This could be construed as retaliation, maybe, for Freud’s lack of enthusiasm for his own work. He was equally dismissive of Craxton’s drawings. ‘In that they lack a direct visual reaction to nature,’ he said, ‘they are empty.’7 Craxton was to take a pop at Ayrton later in life as ‘so puffed up with his own importance, he was the last barrage balloon over London that never got taken down.’8
Edmund Dulac, whose bejewelled illustrations for The Arabian Nights had excited Lucian as a child, saw the exhibition and said that he liked it. He was a family friend. Others too were approached by Lucie Freud to lend support. ‘My mother was not excessive, quite modest, with all her pride. Herbert Read was a friend of my parents – his wife was German – and my mother said, “Why didn’t you write a preface for Lucian?” And he said, “I only write prefaces for refugees.” I thought: fuck him.’ One such refugee, exhibiting coincidentally at Jack Bilbo’s Modern Art Gallery in Charles II Street, was Kurt Schwitters. Read had been persuaded to pen a few lines for him. ‘My life is of an unimaginable complexity,’ he protested, but obliged, Schwitters being so much the opposite of young Freud.9 ‘The bourgeois loves slickness and polish; Schwitters hates them,’ he wrote. Schwitters, he declared, was ‘one of the most genuine artists in the modern movement’.10 Freud missed this Schwitters exhibition, as he never went to Jack Bilbo’s gallery if he could help it. ‘It smelt so horribly. Sylv [David Sylvester] once showed there: brown paintings.’ Bilbo, an ebullient chancer previously named Hugo Baruch, whose gallery operated from 1941 to 1948, complained to Freud once about being a dealer. ‘It’s much more trouble than painting the bloody things.’ His own paintings were shamelessly Picasso-ish, Freud remembered. ‘He did a painting of Owo, his wife: Owo after a Beating, a red-striped painting.’
Despite lacking the Herbert Read stamp of approval, Freud was entitled to consider his debut well received. (‘He certainly arouses interest’: the Studio.) Craxton was recognised as being more obviously stylish than he, and Duncan Macdonald of the Lefevre did not consider him to be in the same league as Robert Colquhoun. More, perhaps, a match for Felix Kelly though with a sharper taste for detail. But it was a start. At least he did not resort to sweeping mannerisms. In his drawings he did his utmost with increasing capability. ‘I always drew all the time, I never questioned why. Later, I deliberately stopped because I thought it was holding me up.’ As for the paintings in the show, ‘I thought some pictures were no good because they were too infantile. It irritated me when people talked about them being “primitive”. They mistook an inability for an affectation.’
When copies of The Glass Tower were delivered from the printers, however, Freud was disappointed. He knew that the book, advertised as being ‘illustrated in colour’ and published at 8s 6d – two shillings less than The Poet’s Eye – was not going to be magnificent, but there was no excuse for everything except the binding being skimped, even by the prevailing austerity standards. The colours – yellow and cyan-blue inks – on ‘that funny wartime paper, very shiny lavatory paper’, were distasteful but the cropping of some of the images infuriated him, and the silly discrepancies in the layout: images facing the wrong way and, at the end, a gull parked arbitrarily opposite a blank page. ‘I made a terrible fuss. I remember being in the office of Mr Roberts, the director of Nicholson & Watson [Ivor Nicholson and Peter Watson] who had assumed financial responsibility for Poetry London, and saying to him: “Look at this one: you’ve cut off two fish tails at the top.” And he said, “What about our boys in Burma? They’re having more than their tails cut off.” I smashed the photograph of his wife off the desk and said I was going to the Society of Authors, so I was offered some money. And then he said, “Look, we’re sending these books to Australia and New Zealand. No one will see a copy in England.” I accepted the extra money.’
The blurb spoke of Nicholas Moore as seeing ‘with the clarity and innocence of childhood (the symbols are childhood symbols) or the cine-eyes of the modern sensitive’, adding that the drawings are ‘in the same mood’; a review in the Times Literary Supplement three months later talked of Moore as ‘a surprisingly unselfconscious poet’ and did not mention Freud.11 Our Time carried an advertisement in which misprints prevailed: ‘with drawings by Lucian Frewd, 8/6 net’. And the review (by Christopher Lee) was dismissive: ‘With rare exceptions they neither think nor feel sufficiently and they lack art. “Words are red as fire and twice as hot” – but these are not.’ Again the illustrations went unnoticed. Yet, alone among the illustrated books published by Editions Poetry London, The Glass Tower, by virtue of the drawings, has sparkle. Where David Gascoyne’s Poems was adorned with stifling Graham Sutherland vistas and where the Henry Moore Shelter Sketch Book was a reprocessing of common humanity into swaddled grubs and where the colour lithographs by Gerald Wilde in Poetry London Ten gave ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ a frenzied drubbing, The Glass Tower has unassuming lucidity. Freud eventually came round to recognising this. ‘It’s got an “I’ve got four hands and none of them work and only one eye and I nearly did it” sort of look. Not a luxury volume. And that’s what’s nice about it.’
The poet-publisher Charles Wrey Gardiner, whose Grey Walls Press operated with diminishing success through the 1940s, recalled in his memoirs, The Dark Thorn, Craxton showing him his paintings, and Freud’s, at Abercorn Place. ‘You had to be careful not to step on a masterpiece if you were fascinated by a zebra’s head sticking out of the wall.’12 Consequently he had reproduced in his literary miscellany New Road 1944, Man with a Feather (then called Self-Portrait, Spring, 1943) and Still Life, Winter, 1943 (not yet Still Life with Chelsea Buns) together with a Craxton drawing called Tree Root in an Estuary, Wales. (‘“The sensitive are being killed gradually,” as Craxton remarked to me sadly over the immense chequered pattern of his jersey.’) Wrey Gardiner asked Freud to do a dust jacket for Franz Werfel’s play Paul Among the Jews, but what he came up with was no good, he decided: ‘The odd squat figure with the two right feet because the girl he was using for the drawing was too cold to take the stocking off her left one. It was unsuitable and I was wrong to allow it to go through.’13 He also commissioned a portrait, Freud remembered with a wince. ‘He asked me to paint Mimi, his girlfriend; usually they tried to stop me painting their girlfriends. I liked the idea, as it was the first that I’d been asked to do, but I couldn’t get on with it. She was giggling and nothing happened.’ Wrey Gardiner himself acknowledged, ‘Mimi bores me, too, as well, and knows it,’14 but he mentioned this with some resentment in The Dark Thorn: ‘Lucian has never finished Mimi’s portrait, blast him. Lucian no longer wears his postman’s trousers and solar topee. Living near the Regent Canal must have sobered him unnaturally.’ And there was more. ‘Lucian Freud’s portrait. Memory is a curved curtain. Let us lower it over the sore places. The platform of Maida Vale Tube station should perhaps be avoided.’15
A man of resounding declarations (‘Let us dedicate ourselves to art for life’s sake, for art is the life blood of humanity’)16 Wrey Gardiner had Nicholas Moore as a partner and assistant for a while and an association with Tambimuttu that helped lead him, as dealings with Tambimuttu generally did, to insolvency. Projecting his own feelings, Wrey Gardiner surmised that Paddington life was getting Freud down.
The dilapidated grandeur of the 1850-ish house now in a slum has its charm. But poor Lucian is not the same man we knew, jumping over posts in the street, laughing with Johnny Craxton. He is terribly changed and looks quite ill. Living a mad existence in the fungoid undergrowth of London night life hasn’t done him any good. I wonder whether he will ever finish the portrait of Mimi he has been doing so long. In the sun in the big airy room he has made into a studio I enjoy myself making acquaintance again with the odd objects with which he surrounds himself, the zebra’s head he is always painting and drawing, the broken wheel hanging on the wall, the striped rug on the bare boards of the floor. The green water of the canal ripples and sings its strange melody. Perspectives open before me of other lives …17
Other lives. Freud knew how to make an entrance; he would appear in a crowded room evasively, with a diffident air, as though seeing himself as a mystery to others. He was seen, for example, to disappear into the bathroom at the Poetry London office in Manchester Square and emerge after a long time saying that he had been ‘thinking’. John Richardson, the future biographer of Picasso, saw him one evening in the Café Royal standing on one leg, looking at the floor. ‘Young Freud at it again,’ someone said. Affectation was a flexing of personality.
‘I was very very shy so I tried to overcome it by being exhibitionistic. I did things for that reason. To do with clothes quite a lot and to do with attitude.’
The urge to startle masqueraded as the exercise of free will. There was dressing up. ‘I used to buy crazy old uniforms in Paddington Market. Boer War uniforms with piping on. Guardsmen’s trousers with red stripes down the side. I saw a kilt in the window of Bantoft & Haines and went in and said I’d like trousers. “We’ll build you some,” they said. I only wore them for best.’ He went to parties in them, plus a dinner jacket on smart occasions. (When years later Princess Margaret asked about the trousers it was explained to her, ‘An old Portuguese tartan ma’am.’)18
‘I was stimulated by extreme economic change, going about. I’ve tried to cultivate it. It’s to do with living in a dump and going out to somewhere palatial, not just physically but to do with people’s ideas and easy-going attitudes, the way English people live, in London anyway. In Germany, I feel, it would have been linked to some more specific social life or vice or sex.
‘The Caribbean Club in Dean Street: I used to live there, practically; it was the first place I ever saw Negroes. It had odd mixtures of people, Euan Drogheda and Ronnie Greville – George Melly was kept by him when he was in the navy – Joy Newton and Bobby and Pauline Newton, were there, undergraduate parties, Etonians and queer actors, and it had a sort of intellectual side – Gerald Berners and the Heber-Percys. Esme Percy, an educated actor with a small private income, was a friend; George Bernard Shaw used to cast him in his plays and he used to try and take me down to see him at Ayot St Lawrence. He said, “He’s fascinating. So mean. We’ll go for tea. There’ll be tea and only one cake and he’ll eat it.” So I didn’t go down.’
Stephen Freud came home on leave. ‘He was an officer of sorts. When on leave he came to Delamere and I took him out to a pub in Maida Vale where they were playing billiards and things; they weren’t used to people in uniform and officers were rare. There were so many tricks people did. A real tough young thug was with this girl and he hit the girl and Stephen said, “I’m not standing for this,” and was very indignant, but I knew it was a put-up job to rob him, so I got him out.’
While sex life had side effects, the show-off life had repercussions. In the Black Horse in Rathbone Street one evening in 1943 someone said to him that he would like him to meet this girl he was having a drink with as she was engaged to someone called Freud. He bristled. ‘I said, “I’d be careful: there are very few Freuds and there are a lot of fakes about.”’ This got back to the fiancé, who turned out to be Cousin Walter. Having arrived in England in 1938, too late as it turned out to be naturalised before war began, in the summer of 1940 Walter and his father, Martin Freud, had been interned on the Isle of Man as aliens. Walter was shipped to Australia on the Duneira but returned and, after a spell in the Pioneer Corps, joined the Parachute Regiment and then SOE. ‘Walter was dangerously active in the commandos,’ his cousin Lux observed. ‘He used to say to girls, “I’m going off to be killed; this is my one last night of love.” He used to get engaged a lot.’
In his autobiography, Glory Reflected, Martin Freud confessed to ‘what today might be called a complex about “honour”’ in describing his humiliation, as a cavalry officer and ladies’ man who immediately on landing in England had taken to wearing an English-type blazer, at being issued with the overalls of an Alien Pioneer. To his nephew he was tragi-ludicrous. ‘It was like working on a slave ship being in the Pioneer Corps and, because of his imperious manner, Uncle Martin got very mucked about. He lived, as his book makes clear, as the eldest son of my grandfather. He had fought some duels in his military career and when the Nazis came he, naturally, didn’t stand for that and he was badly beaten up.’
‘We are very fond of your Uncle Martin,’ Virginia Woolf had said to Freud when Stephen Spender introduced him to her. (‘She was rather terrifying.’) But he himself was not impressed by his uncle’s disposition. ‘My mother felt he treated my father too cursorily and he tried to get money off my mother. He was known for being a bit wayward.’ Unable to practise as a lawyer, Uncle Martin had tried business. ‘He had these business ventures, in a way like a Balzac character reasoning: “How do you make money? Stupid people make money. I’m not stupid. Stupid people are very rich; they go into business and make lots of money. I’ve got it: toothpaste. Everyone has to use it. There’s nothing in it, anyone can make it, the great thing is to put it about.” So he started making this thing: Martin’s toothpaste. We were all instructed to go into the chemist’s to ask for Martin’s toothpaste.’ It was a failure. ‘There was a terrible bust-up with Timothy Whites & Taylors followed by completely non-speaks with Boots. By and by there wasn’t a tube even in the Museum of Patents, or Toothpaste.’ After his stint in the Pioneer Corps, Martin Freud worked as an auditor for the Dock Labour Board and later owned a tobacconist’s in Holborn. ‘He felt he was a grandee but found that the people running it had robbed him mercilessly of 6d a week.’ Hearing about the incident in the Black Horse, he wrote to his disgraceful nephew, this shameless wearer of uniforms off market stalls, who quoted the letter, from memory, as saying: ‘Your Cousin Walter has successfully learned the arts of destruction, and I know them of old, and should advise you to be very careful to keep out of our way.’
‘After the threatening letter I never got right with my uncle. Never saw him.’
Poppy and Hand Puppet (1944), a painting exhibited at the Lefevre and bought by Freud’s parents, begs interpretation: why the disengaged glove puppet with a stocking face, the poppy head lying like a dropped rattle? The puppet was one of several given him some years before, when he was at the Central, by Inge von Schey with whom he had lunched on the steps of the British Museum. It had no particular significance. ‘I feel the composition is a bit haphazard.’ Just as the zebra head (‘full of life and hope’) had stretched over the crumpled paper bag, examining the quince by smell, the poppy and puppet, selected for shape and texture rather than for anything they may signify, are a play of contrast: limpness and husk. Inferences suggest themselves, most obviously the discarding of childish things.
By 1945 Ernst Freud could see that in setting out to make a life for himself as a painter Lucian was doing what he had decided against at the same age when he told his own father that ‘One should either regard painting as a luxury, pursuing it as an amateur, or else take it very seriously and achieve something really great, since to be a mediocrity in this field would give no satisfaction.’19 This view he handed down to Lucian, who rather agreed. ‘It always seemed understood.’ Apart from the two years at Dartington, when his declared ambition was to spend a lifetime working with horses, he always saw himself as a painter. Painting was his only prospect. Having exhibited at the Lefevre he could regard himself as a professional. To that extent his parents could relax and, naturally, Freud was keen to discourage them from taking too close an interest in his activities. Particularly his mother, whose devotion to him and love of domestic order he found stifling. ‘I always avoided her when I grew up. She was so intuitive. I used to go to see my father, sometimes in Walberswick, to get money. He was trustee of the Sigmund Freud copyright and I was always in advance.’ (Royalties, which were to become sizeable, were divided among the five grandsons.) ‘He’d say, “Go and see your mother as you leave.” I’d say yes and go straight out. It was being forgiven I didn’t like. My mother always put nobler motives on my actions than those they were actually prompted by.’
Michael Hamburger, released from the army and now a poet, called on Freud occasionally. ‘He told me about some homosexual experiences he had had in the Merchant Navy; I saw him paint and I remember him telling me he took glucose to give him energy.’20 Gabby Ullstein, who was sent to school in England in the later thirties and stayed on, also visited him in Delamere Terrace. ‘It was cosy but grotty. I liked him: funny and unexpected.’ Whereas Lucie Freud seemed, to her, ‘A great beauty being beautiful, a dramatic lady, always sitting or lying en odalisque. Intense. No jokes.’ Ernst Freud, whom she came across in Walberswick after the war, struck her as rather a rake. ‘Charming: a jolly scoundrel.’21 John Lehmann felt similarly.
As Dick ‘Wolf’ Mosse said, ‘Ernst would make his own rules, write his own passport.’22 He set up odd unrealised business ventures such as Pasta Resin Products, for which Anthony Froshaug designed labels and letter headings and developed an involvement with the man who produced Kangol berets (‘smart at every angle’) who built a factory in Tottenham Court Road. John Lehmann found Ernst Freud ‘Not only an extremely able architect, but a man full of ideas and enterprise’. In 1945 Lehmann wanted to buy a house in London and Ernst Freud went round with him and provided ‘eager and persuasive arguments’ to ‘grab one of the many excellent properties still going cheap before everyone else joined the hunt’. Lehmann liked the way he threw himself into the search, ‘sniffing for dry rot, pulling at peeling wallpaper, shifting piles of rubble-litter with his foot, calculating with lightning speed the cost of mending a roof damaged by incendiaries or a stairway shaken by explosions next door, remodelling interiors to my liking with a conjurer’s dazzling patter – and dismissing the whole vision at once with a slightly diabolical laugh, when he saw me reluctant.’23
‘I lacked family feeling, a sense of being in a family,’ Freud concluded in distant retrospect. ‘I never made any gesture where, anything I did, I felt this was my family. I accepted things as they were. I didn’t feel a unity. Not adverse, but not strings.’
Lorna Wishart was still his muse. The older woman – by almost twelve years – she remained a passionate attachment. When he had first drawn her, three years before, in an ocelot coat of dramatic splendour, Freud had been more exercised over the markings than the face. He gave her the drawing. It was damaged slightly when Laurie Lee smashed the glass, which gave her the opportunity (Freud later claimed) to alter the mouth. The drawing shows her huge-lipped, wide-shouldered, eyes staring beyond the unseen artist, bead necklace embracing the throat, an innocent Amazonian, an unsmiling femme fatale. He drew for her (‘For Lorna Wishart’) an emblematic device of pierced hands, feet and heart: his heart or hers, with a nod to the faith towards which she was now turning. At the same time Laurie Lee, racked with jealousy, couldn’t but regard the liaison as sordid. ‘This mad unpleasant youth appeals to a sort of craving she has for corruption. She doesn’t know how long it will last. She would like to be free of it but can’t … She goes to him when I long for her, and finds him in bed with a boyfriend. She is disgusted but still goes to see him. And tonight she says she is going to Cornwall with him.’24 That boy, Lorna said, was Charlie. When I questioned Freud about this he denied it out of hand. ‘This is fiction; I wouldn’t have; this was made up. Can’t be right.’
On trips together he and she had enjoyed feeling complicit and carefree in the spirit of ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’ like the happy ending for the two little pigs in Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Pigling Bland. At other times the strains showed, as in Woman with a Daffodil, on canvas, and Woman with a Tulip, on panel, painted in the spring of 1945. Fixated and shrunken, they convey, as rarely – if ever – before in Freud’s work, an apprehension of another person’s susceptibilities. ‘The first person I got keen on,’ as he said, the Lorna of Woman with a Daffodil is sickly pale, sunk in grief and grievance, her hair lank with coconut oil, her look matching the sour yellow of the cut daffodil. Woman with a Tulip is head on but thoughts elsewhere, ignoring both the painter and the lopped tulip. The two paintings monitor a faltering relationship. ‘In a way they’re devised. I was more concerned with the subject – she was very wild – than I had been before, so it was a more immediate thing.’ The fifteenth-century look (like a head of Christ by Antonello da Messina in the National Gallery) is weary and resigned; which of course goes with the process of sitting after sitting, mind a blank or simmering with resentment.
Lorna often stayed for weekdays at Delamere Terrace (where these two little paintings were done), returning to Sussex at the weekends; occasionally she brought sixteen-year-old Michael with her; he would sleep on the floor and overhear them in the night. At one stage there had been a plan, initially more Lorna’s than his, for Freud to move into an estate cottage at Binsted but that didn’t work out; Ernest Wishart objected and anyway the set-up wouldn’t have suited him. The cottage was near where Mervyn and Maeve Peake were living. Theirs, he gathered from Lorna, was a rural slum existence. Rather them than him. ‘In an earth dwelling: no rent, no water. Very poor, but they were the sort of people who would give money to a beggar, quiet, modest, and the opposite of Michael Ayrton.’
In the winter of 1944–5 Lorna found a dead heron on the marshes and brought it to Delamere Terrace; her gifts tended to be offerings, placed at his feet. So he painted it, laying down plumage like petals on a wreath, exquisitely inert. ‘I always had a horror of using materials that reminded me of art schools, and that’s why I used Ripolin. I didn’t like the idea of awful Winsor & Newton ready-made kit because I thought that tainted the idea of doing anything.’ Powder paint from the barge shop in the Harrow Road, mixed with oil or water, was closer to Renaissance practice than paint squeezed from tubes. The bedraggled heron is a legless device lopped from an Uccello helmet, cruciform on damp sand, graced with enamel shine. Neither commemorative nor symbolic, more magnificence brought low, it reminded Freud of the stuffed gull that had served as his albatross when he was the Young Mariner with the Dartington Eurythmic Players.
In April 1945, shortly before the war in Europe ended, Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion was exhibited at the Lefevre, along with paintings by Graham Sutherland, Matthew Smith, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Craxton, Colquhoun and others. Bacon had been harbouring the painting for quite some time and this was a sensational addition to the original selection: three bloated deformities on tufts and perches, gurning and gagging in an orange hell. Freud considered Three Studies a work of freakish audacity catapulted out of nowhere. ‘Francis was not only little known, he was almost completely unknown.’ Sutherland’s response was a small gouache, same orange field but instead of pilloried foetal forms a horned and nostrilled cow making eyes; and, as it happened, it was Sutherland who alerted Freud to Bacon. ‘I said, rather tactlessly, “Who do you think’s the best painter in England?” He said, “Oh, someone you’ve never heard of: he’s like a cross between Vuillard and Picasso; he’s never shown and he has the most extraordinary life: we sometimes go to dinner parties there.”’ Sutherland had come across him, Freud recalled a lifetime later, as ‘a quiet roulette-playing gent who lives in South Ken’. Not as a painter. He and Bacon first met, he thought, in late 1944 or early 1945. ‘I feel disinclined to push that I met him earlier than I did,’ he told me. ‘I arranged to meet him at the station to go down to Graham’s in Kent. Once I met him I saw him a lot. Francis said he hardly knew him.’
That was two years after Freud wrote to Felicity Hellaby about the ‘wonderful’ book he had found on diseases of the skin (‘with amazing illustrations: you must come and see it’); his love of such books pre-dated the onset of Bacon’s influence on him; however, his appreciation of the diversion to be had, and the advantage to be gained, by flouting composure and outraging convention was largely provoked by Bacon’s flamboyance and scorn. The painter of Dead Heron and the perpetrator of Three Studies were immediately potentially complicit. The friendship was to spur Freud for the next thirty years. He talked of Lorna being ‘wild’ and that was high praise, but Bacon was, he said, the ‘wildest and wisest’ person he had ever encountered. His first sighting of Three Studies was when he went to Bacon’s studio in Cromwell Place, which had once belonged to Millais (and more recently to the photographer E. O. Hoppé whose portraiture props were still there, prompting Bacon imagery). Three Studies was already in the gold frames that Bacon favoured; for him with his poor rotting heron, Bacon’s three terrorised creatures of the imagination were utter spectacle. Poised like circus acts trained to rage, they were anything from horrors of war – blinded, deafened, crowing over Henry Moore’s shelter sleepers – to Fates assembled to spook the punters at the roulette sessions Bacon had been organising in his studio. Freud did not attend them – he was more attuned to the roll-a-penny arcades around Leicester Square – but he knew the set-up: large cars parked outside, all-night sessions, flagrant law-breaking in respectable South Kensington, classic George Grosz.
‘His nanny was the doorman. She was almost blind and she told him whom he must and mustn’t see. She was unkeen on MacBryde and Colquhoun. I was OK, she liked me, fortunately, and had rather marvellous natural tact: she appeared with tea and disappeared. Francis had scaffolding put up and bogus window-cleaners as lookout men, because it was illegal, quite an elaborate thing. Not hole-in-corner. He took a lot of trouble.’
‘My first show made some money and I was in a position to take out anyone, so I went out with Pauline Tennant. She was a pin-up for the forces, a glamour girl, a bit of a kind of star at the Gargoyle, which her father owned.’ David Tennant’s Gargoyle Club, on the top floor of a fine Georgian house, 69 Dean Street, was tiled with squares cut from antique mirrors on the advice of Matisse, whose Red Studio had been part of the decor when Freud first went there. ‘You went up in the lift then down Matisse’s stairs to a feeling of sub-basement.’ Its glamorous incongruity in the heart of Soho attracted the well-heeled and indefatigable of all ages; among its more opportunistic regulars were Brian Howard and Cyril Connolly, Dylan Thomas, Nina Hamnett and Bobby Newton. Also Freud. Driving back one night from the Q Theatre near Kew Bridge, the actor-director Esme Percy discovered him asleep in the back of his car and obligingly, on waking him, introduced him to his front-seat passenger: David Tennant’s daughter Pauline.
Normally the Gargoyle was a place Freud could patronise only if someone else was paying, but once he knew Pauline Tennant he was well in. Her debut on the scene had been noted in a Picture Post feature in February 1941 under the headline ‘Mr Cochran’s Very Youngest Lady is a Schoolgirl’. ‘At fifteen,’ the magazine prattled, ‘Pauline has the looks of a young film star, the assurance of a society hostess, and all the coltish charm and restless enthusiasms of a schoolgirl, which makes an irresistible combination.’ Within a year she was a Picture Post cover girl. Photographs of Mr Cochran’s discovery showed her laughing and cavorting with her mother, the actress Hermione Baddeley. In reality, Freud maintained, mother and daughter didn’t get on. ‘Pauline envied her mother and longed to be the daughter of her aunt, Angela Baddeley.’ He acknowledged that the ructions could have been to do with a mother’s suspicion of him: a scrounging hanger-on from the Gargoyle. As Ida in the stage and film adaptations of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, Hermione Baddeley was to be moral guidance personified, a blowsy saint attempting to save poor impressionable Rose from Pinky the juvenile thug; that didn’t stop him spending nights with Pauline at the maternal flat over Salmon & Gluckstein, tobacconists, in Piccadilly. ‘We slept between two armchairs and her mother used to bring us tea in the morning on a tray, naked. Under Pauline’s door once came a note: “I expect either a brilliant career or a dull marriage.”’
Freud, Pauline Tennant, Johnny Craxton and Sonia Leon were a foursome for a while; there were evenings at the cinema down the Harrow Road and even a poetry-reading evening with Craxton’s parents in Hampstead where David Gascoyne read. ‘Very good but the audience full of long ladies with gloomy faces and enormous amber beads hanging down and clanking and deathly serious.’25 Pauline was impressed when, walking through Shepherd’s Market one evening, Freud addressed by name every tart they passed. The girls called him ‘Luce’, she noted. He remembered taking her brother David (‘drunk, Etonian, pompous at sixteen in a double-breasted suit’) to see Douglas Cooper, the virulent critic and collector. ‘He walked over to the radiogram and was sick into it: delicate mechanism completely covered in porridge and Douglas Cooper just laughed. Pauline was engaged to Julian Pitt-Rivers and she married a number of people. I drew her in Conté pencil, semi-profile, and a little picture, green and yellowy, her hair her crowning glory, long, blonde: a Veronica Lake look and “one’s mother was an actress” resentment.’ The drawing has her groomed to pin-up perfection, a single wrinkle, picked out in Conté white, traversing her forehead. The painting is little more than a haughty mask and brassy mane. It remained unfinished when in August 1946 she married Julian Pitt-Rivers in St George’s Hanover Square, then went off to Baghdad where Pitt-Rivers was employed as purser to the young Feisal II, King of Iraq. Her third marriage, in 1974, made her Lady Rumbold.
Kitty Epstein once told Pauline Tennant that she was, for Freud, ‘the first step up the ladder’. She was also the most glaring cause of his break with Lorna Wishart.
In the spring of 1945 Cousin Walter of the SOE was parachuted into southern Austria in a squad of six with orders to raise resistance and establish a British presence before the arrival of the Russians; this was to involve seizing an aerodrome at Zeltweg. He landed, however, fourteen miles off-target and finding himself alone spent some time in the mountains before acting on his own initiative and seizing the aerodrome. He then went to the local Nazi headquarters to negotiate surrender, successfully bluffing them and afterwards falling in with a group of Austrian army mutineers who handed over to the Americans. ‘Cousin Walter came back the hero and married the daughter of some Scandinavian ambassador. He became an inventor.’ As a major in charge of a War Crimes Investigation Unit at Bad Oeynhausen, he investigated Krupps and succeeded in identifying Dr Bruno Tesch, the man who developed the poison gas for Auschwitz; he went on to spend most of his working life as a chemical engineer at BP and died in 2004.26
Freud, with no such involvements to vaunt, had given the war a miss as much as he could. However, he quite often dropped in to the news cinemas around Piccadilly Circus for the cartoons and the Fitzpatrick travelogues (‘And now we leave … where nothing has changed for the last two thousand years …’) and there one afternoon he saw something different. ‘I was in the cinema with Lorna and we saw the concentration camps and she burst into tears and I was amazed; I was affected by her being upset but it seemed completely like another world to me. I knew about it, but – something to do with the degree of being adult: young men see torture and suffering and think it’s stimulus or neutral – those pictures of skeletons and all that … I don’t know. It’s to do with feeling not being like that. My mother was concerned, but I think that she would have thought that I must be sheltered from something like that. Even though on the convoy things were pretty horrible: are bits of the body going to fall over us? People weren’t used to seeing horrors on films.’ The news that his four great-aunts had been deported and killed was something he was hardly aware of at the time. ‘I never knew them; I think my mother must have told me about them, but that was years later. She said they were placed in a concentration camp and one of them said, “We consider ourselves distinguished because our brother is very distinguished; instead of waiting here to die we’d like to die right away.” And they said, “Fine.” I didn’t know how close they were; my father would never talk about anything like that as it would upset him.’
VE Day happened in May. Demobbed, Stephen Freud went back to Cambridge, paid for by his Aunt Anna, and Clement Freud came out of the Catering Corps (‘He served his country,’ his hostile brother remarked) to become a liaison officer at the Nuremberg Trials. For Lucian VE Day was memorable only for ‘trying to do what others did: head for Trafalgar Square to get lit up’. Peace meant a future and, with any luck, a livelihood as a painter. There was talk of restrictions lifting and horizons opening up, some time but not soon. Foreign travel remained impossible for non-service people except for those officially employed or able to plead urgent business. Mervyn Peake went to France immediately after VE Day, for Leader magazine, and on into Germany; his dazed drawings of Belsen were published at the end of June; Stephen Spender secured a commission to report on the attitudes of German intellectuals during the war; Cyril Connolly wangled authorisation to travel, being the editor of Horizon, and found Paris wanting. ‘The black market flourishes like a giant fungus, the Resistance is bitter and disillusioned.’ Flying back he saw, horrible below him, under ‘a vast thick cloud of sooty mucus, ring-worm circles of brick villas, grey and gloomy factories and towers’.27 This was London, not flattened but decrepit. Auden, who had been in America throughout the war, arrived in London as a major in the US army attached to the United States Strategic Bombing Survey and, he boasted, ‘the first major poet to fly the Atlantic’.28 In the course of seeing again Spender and John Lehmann, Britten and Eliot and everyone else whom he thought mattered, he told Freud that he was the one person he really wanted to see.
‘Auden made lots of amorous propositions to me. Jimmy Stern the writer, whose wife Tania, a psychiatrist’s daughter, was my mother’s best friend, came over with him, which is how I got to know him.’ Auden harangued his friends on Britain’s impoverishment and loss of status and on the awful food and lack of heating. ‘London hasn’t really been bombed,’29 he said, not having seen as much damage as he had expected. ‘He felt that people in London didn’t want to know him and I saw him in a very concentrated way for a while.’ He urged Freud to read The Hobbit; J. R. R. Tolkein’s concept of a Nordic starter saga disguised as a children’s book and realised in pedantic detail appealed to his donnish schoolboy streak; Freud found it tiresome, marginally preferring Mervyn Peake’s labyrinthine Titus Groan, also recommended by Auden. Its excesses were more appropriate to the circumstances of being detained in England and longing to get away. ‘Auden was someone who decided everything beforehand. He had read Sigmund Freud at school and I think he decided that I was his new friend, which up to a point I was, but I think he also decided I was his boyfriend, or could be, which I wasn’t. And then he wrote from America: he had ideas about art, which were completely silly, but some of his ideas were very stimulating, absolutely brilliant, up to a point. He said, “Violence is such a bore.” His last words, he said to me, were going to be: “I’ve never done this before.”’
During the hot summer of 1945 Freud often bathed in the canal. ‘I used to jump in off the bridge. There was an electric cable in the mud and a boy dived from the bridge and touched it and was killed and so they looked round for the oldest person to blame and I was tipped off to keep out of the way, so I stopped bathing there.’
In June Neo-Romanticism was in full flourish with the first performance of Britten’s Peter Grimes, at Covent Garden, and the release of Powell and Pressburger’s jaunty Hebridean odyssey I Know Where I’m Going. That month Freud drew Peter Watson on Ingres paper, marmoreal, near Neo-Classical, hunched slightly, with dandyish diffidence, in his furrowed corduroy jacket. This drawing, lucid, restrained, intimate and above all responsive in character, marked the onset of Freud’s graphic finesse: since the comparable drawing of Craxton some months before (Young Man, 1944) there had been a sharpening of focus, a burnishing of perspicacity. Watson, still Freud’s most generous and undemanding patron, was seeing his prospects begin to open out after six years of cultural insularity. Once again, he was thinking, he could live in Paris.
With beach defences dismantled and the more remote British Isles accessible once again, the Neo-Romantic impulse went island hopping, if only in fancy. ‘Perhaps we shall see islands again some day,’ wrote Wrey Gardiner in The Dark Thorn. ‘The Scillies, the Atlantic Islands of Madeira and the Azores, the West Indies: What an escapist dream they look like on the page. The island is a symbol.’30
‘Everything on the Scillies is in miniature, although once on the islands one seems to be walking up hills and down valleys; the Scillies form a little world complete in themselves,’ John Betjeman rhapsodised in his 1934 Shell Guide to Cornwall. English holidaymakers there in the immediate post-war years could imagine they were abroad. Palm trees flourished on at least one of the islands and, marooned on shore, figureheads salvaged from wrecks strained towards the sea. Besides cosy scale and shoreline surreality, the Scillies offered oceanic skies. As Geoffrey Grigson enthused in his 1948 Vision of England guide to the Scilly Isles: ‘Light is the energiser of the Isles of Scilly, a light sharper, clearer, giving more definition than the hazy light of the English mainland.’
In this beguiling place, recommended to Craxton and him by EQ, Freud came as close as he ever would to slipping into Neo-Romantic idiom. But even in the Scillies, when Peter Watson paid for them to go there in the late summer of 1945, he drew plants, boats and black rocks on beaches roundly and singularly, as though Robinson Crusoe had just clapped eyes on them. The Scillies, Freud’s first proper islands since childhood on Hiddensee, and as remote as one could be from London while remaining in England – ‘a tropic in a northern sea / where palm joins gorse’, the poet Anne Ridler wrote31 – were to be stepping stones, he hoped, to the continent. He and Craxton needed to get to Paris in time to see the exhibition ‘Picasso Libre’. ‘I longed to go to France and couldn’t so went to the Scilly Isles.’ Many refugees from France in 1940 had arrived in Britain by way of the Scillies. ‘I thought I could stow away on one of the Breton fishing boats to get to France. But they said we’re not taking you unless you have a bicycle – there were no bicycles in France – so I went back to London, got a bicycle, went all the way back to the Scillies, gave it to them and stowed away on the Breton boat, and then the harbour police came. Obviously tipped off by them.’
They stayed first on St Mary’s, the largest island, then on Tresco. ‘A horrible family the Dorrien-Smiths owned it and made it very feudal: everyone was subservient to them.’ They took rooms in a fisherman’s cottage. ‘A slightly unusual fisherman: his wife was from Plymouth and made puppets.’ Meanwhile Major A. A. Dorrien-Smith, whose ancestor T. A. Dorrien-Smith had discovered that the Monterey Pine made the best windbreak and had initiated commercial flower-cultivation on Tresco, held sway. There were also the doctors: Dr John Wells, who had ambitions as a painter and was about to remove himself to Cornwall where he became part of the St Ives School, and ‘an Italian doctor – “The Count of San Remo” – he was rather old with a moustache and had been told that he’d better not move away while the war was on. His son, Giorgio, was very handsome and there weren’t many hostesses around in the islands so he had a nurse – who I rather liked; he used to go with this fat nurse into the rushes, which was very exciting: pink on Scillonian sand.’ Craxton dallied with Sonia Leon, sixteen years old and half-Jewish, whom he had met on the boat to the Scillies and who later married the writer Peter Quennell. (‘Fourth wife called Spider,’ Freud commented. ‘Maddening giggle.’) Freud struck up with another girl on the Scillonian. ‘She was being sick at the time, the boat pitched, and I went off her then. Her green face.’ She lived on the other side of the island and he watched out for her, using binoculars, only to find that he was being looked back at, through binoculars, by her father. Who, when they met, commented on the zoot suit he was wearing, made up for him by a Welsh tailor in the Marylebone Road for £3 10s: long jacket and trousers with wide knees and narrow ankles. ‘He was terrifically fascistic. “It’s a bit jewy,” he said.’ Freud used to lie around with the girl, not draw her; it was ‘a sort of holiday affair’ and Lorna Wishart found out.
‘She found some letters the girl had written to me and wrote back a letter signed “Freud and Co” saying “just leave us alone”.’ By another account the letters were from Pauline Tennant; there were probably letters from both. ‘The girl on the Scillies proposed to me but I said, “I can’t; I’m sort of not free.” So Lorna said, “I thought I’d given you up for Lent but I’ve given you up for good.”’ The falling-out was violent. Freud did all he could to win her round; he gave her a white kitten, presenting it to her in a paper bag; and then he galloped on a white horse across the fields and up to her window at Marsh Farm, suicidally fast. ‘At the time of the break-up she had drawings, small ones, which she destroyed and she wrote to tell me so. It was the end. I wondered why. I was very cut up about it.’ One surviving drawing, inscribed ‘For Lorna 27.11.45’, was a clean sweep of Scillonian beach with a single pebble, a lone sea thistle and black rocks like sharks’ fins in the sea beyond. He also sent her the emblematic bleeding heart and pierced hands and feet the size of a prayer card. ‘She was more and more Catholic.’
Craxton said, ‘Lucian was really in love and when she dumped him he was terribly hurt.’32 He went after her, and there was an incident with a shotgun. ‘I remember shooting,’ Freud admitted. ‘I wasn’t aiming at her; it was, as it were, an Annunciation.’ The Wisharts always associated one particular tree as being the one that Freud had shot. Or was it that he hit a cabbage?
When Freud went to Paris the following year he lit candles for Lorna. ‘Without being religious, it was a way of keeping in touch.’ He hardly saw her again. ‘I’m never any good at going back.’ She constructed a shrine in the form of a grotto, destroyed the letters that he had sent her, took up gardening and attended mass daily. Reconciled with her husband, she nursed him devotedly at the end of his life; he died in 1987, she in 2000. For Freud she remained an ideal figure, a true muse; her dismissal of him was all the more disheartening in that he had obsessed her and she had forsworn him. This was a passion that he could all too easily understand. Did her newfound faith diminish her liveliness? ‘I can’t say. Probably a lively religious life.’
Preoccupied yet readily diverted, Freud had appetites to slake. Dick Wyndham’s daughter Joan, whom he had first encountered, by her account, at the poet William Empson’s New Year’s Eve party in Hampstead (presumably 1945/6) was one such distraction quickly realised and, in terms of involvement, about as weighty as a couple of picture postcards.33 Freud took her down to a basement nursery where Empson’s children, Mogador and Jacob, were sleeping. Empson discovered them there and chucked them out so they went off through the snow to his studio where a hawk sat in a cage eating a mouse. They went to bed. Next morning, she recalled, he drew the hawk and then, wearing his grandfather’s long black coat with a fur collar, took the hawk out for a walk. An involvement developed and she went around with him for several weeks, often with Johnny Craxton, ‘his inseparable companion’,34 to the Café Royal, to concerts in Chelsea Town Hall, to a performance of Picasso’s jibber-jabber play Desire Caught by the Tail and to second-hand clothes stalls in street markets. ‘A new twist to our relationship: we were in bed when a girl’s voice said “Cuppa tea, love?” and I saw this dark girl with huge eyes who totally ignored me and didn’t offer me any tea. The next two nights she slept on the sofa … I think her name was Kitty.’ What Freud really liked, she reported him as remarking, was to pick up unknown little girls in the park and bring them home like stray kittens. ‘One thing I liked about Lucian was that he always told me the truth, no matter how painful. And’, she added, ‘you never knew where you were with him, and he liked it that way.’35
A mixed exhibition at the Lefevre in February 1946 included Ben Nicholson, Sutherland (thorns), Craxton, MacBryde and Colquhoun, Bacon’s ‘Figure Studies’ picturing tweedy rumps and, on one wall, four paintings by Freud: Dead Heron, Scillonian Beachscape and the two portraits of Lorna Wishart. Bryan Robertson, writing in the Studio, in March 1946, on ‘The Younger British Artists’ (‘a brave company … carefully probing in different directions’) cited Ayrton, Craxton and Minton, but made no mention of Bacon or Freud. They did not fit in. Maurice Collis on the other hand, writing in the Observer, singled out Woman with a Tulip for comment: ‘a tiny portrait by Lucian Freud, the youngest of the young men here, shows remarkable skill. He may turn out the most gifted.’36
Freud’s drawings of sea holly and cacti among the pines and palms of Tresco came as close as he ever would to the profuse ground cover effected by Craxton and Minton. His preferred objects were prickly and stranded. ‘On the beach in Tresco there was an old lifeboat and I did an elaborate drawing, the same size as Drumnadrochit, in ink, quite hatched, with the bottom of the boat with old green paint on it which I used.’ A similar boat painting – ‘a little long one on a bit of board, slight hole in it’ – he gave as a thank-you to Peter Watson.
Cedric Morris kept two or three of Freud’s Scillies drawings stuffed in a cupboard at Benton End and would show them to visitors, smoothing out the creases. Dr Hoffer bought one, as did Podbielski, who had returned from Australia anxious to advance himself socially and write a novel. ‘I think he thought either a high-powered social life would help with the arts or the other way round. Suddenly he was a great friend of Princess Margaret: she gave a party for him in the fifties.’
Dead Heron was reproduced a few months later in Orion III (a literary miscellany published by Nicholson & Watson), illustrating ‘Some Young Contemporary British Painters’, an article by Michael Ayrton, who wrote: ‘Oddly enough the work of the young painter who seems to me to approach nearest in treatment and conception to Stanley Spencer is Lucian Freud. Whilst not British in origin, he may be said to be of the “School of London”.’ Comparisons with Spencer always irritated Freud (Spencer, it is safe to assume, never noticed) because of their basic dissimilarity. At most they operated at cross-purposes with occasional overlaps. Spencer invariably composed, proceeding from drawing to squared-up drawing transferred to canvas and then filling in systematically; whereas Freud, even early on, painted by aggregation, building up the image not from drawings but from unmediated observation. The ‘School of London’ tag, applied here for the first time, was to be rather more irksome, indeed something of a stuffed albatross around his neck. Ayrton emphasised that Freud’s work was ‘completely divorced from Sutherland’s and from his friend John Craxton’s, in that the content is utterly static’. He argued that painters such as Freud were essentially northerners. ‘The core of that tradition is northern, whatever overstrains and undercurrents of Mediterranean art may be present. Its strength lies in this fact, and its individuality.’37
Freud was learning to be unambiguous. As he went on he became more aware of the ways people operate, the ways things appear, the chances to be taken, the ramifications of acquaintance and the demands of involvement. The paintings were beginning to reflect his feelings in distinctive ways. For example, unlike the vanilla icebergs of conceit in Man with a Feather, the black rock islets in Scillonian Beachscape – painted back in Delamere Terrace in the winter of 1945/6 – slit the stillness of the dark-blue sea. The aggrandised pebble, so neatly flawed, was a find; the puffin came from a Bewick wood engraving; the sun-dried sprig of sea holly was taken from a drawing. Rocks, puffin, holly, stone: rhyme, contrast and singularity in a clear morning light, neither symbolic nor surreal. The play on scale (puffin, pebble, seed head) and the clarity of touch create a sort of vigil. Freud’s Scillies becomes Shelleyesque:
The birds did rest on the bare thorn’s breast.
Scillonian Beachscape was bought by F. S. Hess. ‘A great friend of my father for a time. Bought a house in Walberswick. Hess had been an incredibly successful financier in Germany, his wife was a sculptor who studied with Barlach, and he was monstrously dishonest. When he played chess he cheated, my father said. He had Scillonian Beachscape above the fireplace and it flaked, got dandruff and had to be restored.’