The Lives of Lucian Freud

‘He was rather nice and repulsive’

In January 1960 Freud, accompanied by a journalist, went to Stockholm to draw Ingmar Bergman. This was a commission from Time magazine. He did not like the idea of being obliged to deliver, but gambling debts left him with little choice. Anyway, he told himself, there was not necessarily any great difference between a task imposed and work self-imposed. ‘As Auden said “You either get commissioned or commission yourself.”’ Besides, the money was good. Time magazine offered first £500 then £900 for a cover picture, which he accepted on the understanding that he would be paid half the fee if it were not used. He wondered if his suing them thirteen years before might be held against him. ‘They said, “We know you’ve had some trouble with us but don’t worry about that.”’

Time covers usually consisted of a portrait in a red surround overprinted with title and headlines, a design little changed since their Sigmund Freud one in 1924. The layout had advantages, Bacon suggested. ‘Francis gave me this idea: prepare the canvas dark blue and then you’ve got the ground. Less work. After all, it was what he did always.’ As for the artwork, a positive emphasis was required, for impulse sales at the news stand depended on each week’s face being attractive or arresting with probity wrinkles on elder statesmen. To make the cover of Time was widely considered ultimate recognition. The accolade however did not impress Bergman who, having recently made Virgin Spring with Bibi Andersson, was still in the first flush of international reputation. He didn’t feel like putting himself out for the cover artist.

‘Bergman was terribly unpleasant, offhand, very much why need you bother the great me? He wanted to fuck Bibi Andersson that afternoon so kept me waiting. His excuse was that he had “family” and “music” at the weekend. I would have stayed two weeks but I left. “Some people go to the cinema just to hold hands,” I told him. My real difficulty was turning the journalist against Bergman and persuading him too to leave after a few days. He had a crush on Bibi Andersson, and so I said, “Look, he goes off to have Bibi first thing in the morning, they leave the studio and that’s it.”’ The studio was in a converted ostrich farm outside Stockholm with Crittall steel windows and flies.

He brought back to London a small dark glimpse of Bergman on navy blue, an image verging on the Baconian. And given that Bacon used to dismiss literal-looking portraits by saying that they were like Time covers, it was imperative, Freud felt, not to please the art editors awaiting his submission. ‘I told them I hadn’t done the painting. I did a sort of profile. But I hated the idea it would be reproduced and sold four million times. Since I never gave them the cover, it was a slight scam.’ Instead he gave the preliminary sketch to Sir Oliver Scott, a cancer specialist, whom he knew through Joan Bayon from Cambridge. It was a repayment. ‘He had lent me a bit of money. I did a portrait of his wife Phoebe and a daughter and he admired Bergman.’

The trip to Stockholm proved memorable not for Bergman but for a Rembrandt : The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis: The Oath, in the National Museum, intended for Amsterdam Town Hall but not paid for and returned to the artist, who cut it down, removing the setting, reshaping it into a profane Last Supper in which the one-eyed chieftain presides over befuddled heads and lambent sword blades, his passion setting the table eerily aglow.

‘My favourite Rembrandt. I’ve been terrifically affected by it. It’s the largest painting he ever did. He cut three or four feet off it and put a crazy figure across the bottom in the foreground. And he made it night.’

Cecil Beaton spent an evening with Bacon shortly after Freud’s trip to Stockholm and they discussed what had happened. ‘There had been too many interruptions for Lucian to produce any result, and he now hated Time magazine, Bergman and Sweden.’ Freud had returned to England ‘fuming’, he wrote.

We then talked of Lucian’s latest painting – how he seemed, in an effort to paint quicker, to have lost some of his intensity. Lucian was intelligent enough to know that his painting up to now was not a complete expression of himself . He now found himself in the awful predicament of having to try and discover himself again. That, for someone of Lucian’s vanity, was a difficult thing to do.

We discussed Lucian’s intellectual brilliance, his complete independence and strength as a man who knew exactly what he wanted out of life. But we admitted that Lucian is no angel.

Beaton told Bacon – a Bacon grinning at him no doubt – that, to him, in some respects, Freud really was impossible. ‘I admitted I found it difficult to be loyal to Lucian all the time. I could not understand the mentality of gamblers and it worried me that Lucian should lose so much so readily.’¹

To Freud this diary entry, which he read when Beaton’s Selected Diaries were first published in 1979, showed the ageing photographer bent on keeping in with a younger set – ‘his being with-it’; but it was true, of course, that gambling programmed him and propelled him, willing the win and stomaching the losses. It was a draining routine. Lunching at Wheeler’s once, with Auerbach and Bacon, he fell asleep, head hitting the table top, then woke up suddenly and proceeded to an evening’s activity.

After 1960, when the Gaming Act legalised gambling, there was chemmie or roulette to go for at the Clermont Club above Annabel’s in Berkeley Square or at Siegi’s in Charles Street, at the Playboy Club in Park Lane, Apron Strings in Chelsea and anywhere else where his credit held. But he preferred the horses. ‘Horses are the most sympathetic way of losing money because it’s done without other people. Baccarat is OK as it’s against the bank.’ Frank Auerbach, whom he took to the Playboy Club, marvelled at his ability to keep three games of chemmie in play simultaneously. Yet the consequences were often awkward. (‘There were lots of streets I couldn’t go through.’) Not so much the losses, which he liked to think of as spent ammunition, but the retaliation over sudden debts. ‘Bailiffs came quite often. Not for gambling debts: you couldn’t send the bailiffs for those; that’s why they build up this code of honour, this “gentleman’s word” nonsense. Heavies came. They realised I ran into money every so often and they knew I couldn’t be frightened. (You can tell from people whether they can or can’t.) I always minded being threatened.’

He usually tried reasoning with the enforcers. ‘I actually went round once. “Look,” I said, “I haven’t got any money but I’ll come on Thursday afternoon.” When I went round to the court in Marylebone Road, the heavies were there and one said, “Look who’s here. You’re supposed to say you’ll come and then not come and then we’ll chase you.”’ His experience of bailiffs and their demands prompted a habit of parking works with friends so that he could swear they weren’t his. Auerbach felt that his opportunistic feel for a deal or gambit was fundamental. ‘Lucian was keen on that business life. He knew exactly how to operate. He was very good at all that and he had a sort of awareness of the art market.’

This was thriller territory extending from literature to identity parade. Much of the Paddington of Margery Allingham’s 1952 crime novel The Tiger in the Smoke, ‘winding miles of butter-coloured stucco in every conceivable state of repair’ scheduled for slum clearance, was only the length of a street or the width of a canal from districts infiltrated by venturesome members of the upper classes such as Patrick Kinross and Diana Cooper, who settled in Little Venice in the early sixties. By then other cultural shifts had occurred and prejudices were inflamed, leading to racist agitation and brawls.

Verlaine had discovered London to be, for all its vastness, really ‘only a group of little scandalmongering towns in rivalry’ and, Freud found, so it remained in Paddington, though with changes in the populations involved. ‘When the Negroes came in the fifties it changed very much. Even burglars. People who snatched wallets and broke into cars said Negroes would cut the finger off a woman with rings. “D’you know what they do? It’s absolutely disgusting, they live all together, five to a room, in a house given them by the council.” They were terribly anti-Negro.’ They were not the only ones. One night he took the Everly Brothers to a club. ‘They were amazed that I was friendly with “all those coloured people”, being Southerners.’

The biggest slum landlord in the area was Peter Rachman, an ex-concentration-camp and Siberian-detention-camp inmate five years older than Freud, who played cards with him occasionally in a basement club off Old Compton Street. ‘Mandy Rice-Davies used to be on his lap. He was rather nice and repulsive. “Millionaires: that’s a word people use a bit freely these days,” he said. I was walking once with Ann Fleming from Delamere to Diana Cooper’s, in Warwick Avenue, and we saw him, red in the face, in this pale-blue open Bentley and, Ann said, “straight out of Ian’s book”. A Bond villain. He met Negroes and gave them flats and said “make yourself at home” to them: rooms already let to Paddington natives. Poor families from Paddington thought this terrible really.’

Rachman was driving along Lower Wardour Street one day in the open Bentley and somebody said something, or made a rude sign, or flicked the paintwork. Freud saw Rachman stand up in the car screaming at the man and a gang outside a club turned on the man and roughed him up.

In 1960, two years before he died of a heart attack, Rachman came under pressure from Ronnie and Reggie Kray , the gangster twins, who had previously operated mainly in the East End. They did protection for Rachman, Freud learned. ‘Reggie said “His rent collectors were big, but our boys were bigger.”’ Hoping to divert them or placate them, Rachman brought to their attention the possibility of taking over Esmeralda ’s Barn in Wilton Place, Knightsbridge, a gambling club patronised by Guards officers and the like. Through his ‘violent landlord operation’ as the Met put it, Rachman was connected to Stefan de Faye who ‘owned’ it and Rachman gave it to the Kray s. The Gaming Act had opened up the West End to clubs so this was their entrée into the classy world.

Freud knew Esmeralda’s Barn from the days when David Litvinoff had masqueraded as him there. Once it became a casino operated by the Krays he went more often. Litvinoff still hung around there and irked the new owners with his lip and his sarcasm. ‘They didn’t like that. He worked for Rachman. Rats painted with fluorescent paint were put through letterboxes to flush out tenants.’ It was rumoured that the Krays each stood to make £40,000 a year from the tables but their East End practice of enticing punters into debt then leaning on them for favours proved inappropriate for what Ronnie described as ‘a real posh West End club’. Those who wouldn’t pay up could be thrown downstairs but, in Belgravia, this was not the way to handle such matters. Worse, the tax inspectors began making demands.

Freud would often call in at Esmeralda’s Barn after staying overnight at Wilton Row. ‘I’d get up at 4.30, summer mornings, and go there for an hour or so on my way to Delamere: the Yahoos gambling, crazy, and Ronnie Kray in evening dress. “I suppose you think they’re a real lot of cunts,” I said to him. “They lose a lot of principle this way, I know,” he said.

‘At the club a smooth, pleasant, absolute crook oily businessman – Lesley Payne – said, “I know your work is valued, but could you give me someone to paint my wife?” So I suggested Mike [Andrews], who was broke and delighted, and he worked from her. Then Lesley Payne told him to stop and so Mike left it; he would have finished it and asked for money, but he couldn’t go on as the wife was ill. And so the smooth con-man manager stole it. I felt badly about it.’

‘It became amusing to be seen with the twins,’ Auerbach added. ‘Francis [Bacon] quite liked a villain. I remember him saying, “I’ve got to go and get some chrysanthemums because the Krays are calling. And I want to fill the studio with chrysanthemums to soften their hearts.” They would come round and suggest he gave them a picture. Francis managed to charm them off.’ He and they established, Freud gathered, mutual interests: boys, sadism and so on. ‘Francis met the Krays and Billy Hill in Tangier. They were there on some rackets and they discovered about Francis’s work: how he could do this magic.’ When the Krays, or their associates, heard how much money his paintings fetched some were stolen and he had to pay a lot to get them back.

‘Both can be overwhelmingly hospitable,’ Francis Wyndham wrote, tongue in cheek, in his note on the Krays for David Bailey’s Box of Pin-Ups, published in 1965, three years before they received life sentences. ‘To be with them’, he added, ‘is to enter the atmosphere (laconic, lavish, dangerous) of an early Bogart movie, where life is reduced to its simplest terms and yet remains ambiguous.’

Under the same roof as Esmeralda’s Barn was the Cellar Club. ‘The lesbian club downstairs was pretty nice,’ Freud recollected. ‘When I went there it was run by this girl Patsy Morgan-Dibben , fearfully attractive, so I asked her out and said, being polite: “Like to come to Annabel’s?” She said, “No, let’s go to bed straight away.” I hardly knew her at all; she was married to Horace Dibben, an antique dealer from Salisbury, a long-sideburn man, a fetishist. In her flat there was a kind of replacement person in the next room, called in before I left. It was fairly nasty because she was having amyl nitrate. Smells horrible. “What are you doing?” I asked. She said, during what might be called a poignant moment, “You’d like a man – or boy – on top of you.” “No I wouldn’t.” It was not a memorable success.’

Patsy Morgan-Dibben went off to the mountains of Bavaria with an Argentine millionaire. ‘She was glamorous, started a hotel in Venice and had a huge success with that.’ Esmeralda’s Barn – Cellar Club included – closed in 1963, the year some of her regulars (Michael Astor, Stephen Ward, Christine Keeler) achieved extreme notoriety.

‘It was a terribly muddy pool Lucian was in,’ said Michael Andrews. ‘The Kray twins’ henchman called him in one day. He’d lost a great deal of money and he was told what he was going to have pulled off and broken and he said, “Well, you’ll have to do that, but if you do, and kill me, you won’t get the money.” They found it very amusing.’

Freud himself remembered that encounter as a touch more conciliatory. ‘I said, “I’m going to pay you when I’ve got the money and if you kill me you won’t get the money,” an argument that impressed them; in fact the Krays never had any money and no one ever got paid. Other gangs had big things going; the Richardson s – Charlie and Eddie – actually had investments, but the Krays never had big funds. They had protection money, but I doubt if they ever had £100,000. They were thieves’ ponces, unsuccessful villains; they would appear at a share-out and would say, “Well done, boys, we’re collecting for the widows.” The only heroic thing they did was long before I met them: Ronnie couldn’t bear being in jail and Reggie didn’t mind much and so Reggie went in over the wall and took Ronnie’s place. People were impressed. They talked about the twins as having hearts of gold. The only people they did things to were their own. I kept out of their way. I took the precaution of not going to boxing matches, where bullies show their front, or going down certain streets. I didn’t want to anger them. When they were amongst their own people, in the East End, the police left them alone, as they were brothers and friends of the villains. In the West End it was out of the question for them to be left alone.

‘Bill Lloyd – friend of Tim Willoughby’s, in love with Jane and wanted to be one of the boys – paid my debt to the Krays. It was two or three hundred pounds. “I thought it would be better to,” he said. I didn’t say how dare you. I’ve got this thing I could never do anything under pressure.’ Yet Kray pressure did have its effect. David Somerset remembered one particularly urgent call. ‘He rang me up at four in the morning. “Dave, can I come round?” “What’s it about?” I asked. “Fifteen hundred pounds and if I haven’t got it by twelve o’clock they’re going to cut my tongue out.”’

At one point Freud was rumoured to have owed the Krays half a million. ‘I can’t be threatened,’ he claimed, but he took care not to infringe Kray taboos. ‘It was all no swearing. If anyone said, or was rumoured to have said, one was queer – which Ronnie was – their life was in danger. Ronnie said, “I’m not a poof, I’m homosexual.”

‘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 lat er – 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 go urmet 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 behind 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 wa s 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 Viscount ess 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 rat her 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 man ner 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 Hair ed 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

The Paddington clearances gradually eliminated the slum heritage of Mayhew’s London, as John Rothenstein of the Tate discovered when he arranged to call on Freud one afternoon early in 1962. He went to Delamere Terrace, saw the car parked – it could only have been Freud’s – and scrawls on doors indicating that water and electricity had been cut off. ‘You’re not looking for an artist, Mr Frood, are you?’ a passer-by asked him. ‘There’s one or two houses in the street that’s left. He’s there.’ In a ‘minute and derelict studio’ – at number 4 – Freud and a bottle of champagne awaited him.⁵ In 1961 the Tate bought Man with a Thistle, Freud’s chill self-portrait on Poros, prickliness exemplified.

Rothenstein was gat hering material for what was to be the third and last and most perfunctory of his volumes of biographical sketches of British artists. Freud found him irritating. ‘He used to pester me a bit, kept on that I was the most underrated painter in England, and then he said he wanted to do a book and I wrote a rather rude letter as I felt this was the wrong time to do it. Francis and I asked him for a drink and he said, “I was looking through my diaries and how heartening it was to find you and Francis so loyal.”’

In a vendetta conducted against him in the early fifties by LeRoux Smith LeRoux and Douglas Cooper, with Graham Sutherland, then a Tate trustee, acting as Cooper’s cat’s-paw, Rothenstein had been accused of mismanagement, embezzlement and poor taste. Rothenstein’s offence lay in not responding enough to Cooper’s violent directives, leading to accusations that he was parochial in outlook and useless when it came to acquiring significant foreign works of art for the Tate. For example, in 1940 he had failed to alert his trustees to Matisse’s Red Studio, which for years had hung in the Gargoyle Club; eventually it had gone for less than £1,000 to the Museum of Modern Art. That was grounds for permanent reproach. However, those ganged up against him – a bully, a con man and Sutherland – were discredited and Rothenstein survived. He even biffed Cooper in 1954 at the private view of Dicky Buckle ’s Diaghilev exhibition, knocking his glasses off and gaining the attention of gossip columns and cartoonists.

Bacon had some sympathy for him, for Rothenstein had been viciously maligned. Freud felt the same. ‘Just a poor old thing. And he had this pathological passion for girls. He was so short-sighted; he could hardly see; he wrote something about how my circle “ranged from Max Ernst to Princess Margaret”. He said he’d seen me with them at Les Deux Magots. I wasn’t actually at a table with Max Ernst and Princess Margaret, but nearly.’

He and Bacon dined with Rothenstein in the lofty stuffiness of the Athenaeum and planted the idea of Bacon exhibiting at the Tate. Happily, Rothenstein adopted the suggestion as his own idea and a retrospective followed in the summer of 1962. Naturally there were complaints. Ben Nicholson, writing to Herbert Read, included Freud in a diatribe against the anti-modernists. ‘I never saw a more profoundly uninteresting?.’ Rothenstein was accused of conniving with commercial interests in promoting a Marlborough artist, a distasteful one at that. The exhibition, which was toured to Turin, Zurich and Amsterdam, established Bacon as the leading British painter, unquestionably Sutherland’s superior and, among British artists of international reputation, second only to Henry Moore who consequently, and unawares, became his butt.

‘I remember one day, when he hadn’t been with the Marlborough for long, Francis said, “I had a long talk with Henry Moore. I think I really managed to fuck up his work.”’

This was around 1964 when Moore and Bacon were shown together at the Marlborough in notional harmony: the human figure roundly celebrated thereby. By 1967 Moore and his representatives were discussing with Rothenstein’s successor, Norman Reid, the possibility of establishing a permanent space at the Tate for a great legacy from his estate. This provoked forty-one artists, including several of his former assistants, Anthony Caro among them, to write to The Times objecting to the imposition on the nation of a Moore mausoleum. The thought of such a burden on the Tate was enough to put Bacon off any further contact with Moore.⁶

The possibility of turning to sculpture and solidifying the image rather than flatly depicting it tantalised Bacon. Freud (who was to order a load of clay some years later with the notion of trying sculpture again) became used to hearing Bacon holding forth on what might be achieved. ‘For a long time – a year or two – Francis talked about the sculptures he was going to do. People on beds. They were so exciting. He said he would do it because he was so practical and he was so stimulated by it, and he talked it away. The only thing they sounded like that had ever been done were effigies on tombs; but they were going to be … not wax: certainly a lot of metal was involved. All these things had real meaning early on, and then got somehow lost through drink and repetition and boasting. Which can be very good for people; I mean people can boast themselves into doing more. Egg themselves on.’