Lucian Freud’s Sitters

Celia Paul | London Review of Books | 12th September 2024

A fascinating essay. Paul was one of Freud’s many lovers. She writes with a candour informed by their romantic relationship and subsequent long “complicated intimacy”. Reviewing Freud’s portraits of his lovers, she diagnoses the trajectory of those relationships at the moment of painting and the substantial impact they had on his art. Paul is also candid about Freud. There was an “enduring love and trust that Lucian could feel for men. He never trusted his female lovers to the same extent.”