Lucian Freud Portraits

'What do I ask of a painting?' Freud once mused.  'I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.'

Freud's portraits bear testimony to all of these qualities. 

The exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery is not a memorial exhibition, as Sandy Nairne, director of the gallery, is at pains to point out. It had been planned with the artist as far back as 2006, before Freud's death aged 88 last year. Gathered together are 130 of Freud's works, from his early portraits in the 1940s and 50s through to his final canvas. The shift in styles in the late 1950s and 60s, towards his distinctive impasto realism, is particularly noticeable.

There is something about Freud's nudes that I find unsettling. 'Naked Girl Asleep II', for example, presents us with a recumbent figure in seemingly innocent slumber, but for the perspective which has us staring up her crotch; while in 'Naked Man with Rat' we find a pensive, reclining man, whose legs are splayed to bare his genitals. 

One of the best-known works in the exhibition, however, has to be 'Benefits Supervisor Sleeping' (pictured above), which fetched £17.2 million when it was sold in 2008 – then the highest price paid for a work by a living artist. The portrait is one of several that Freud painted of Sue Tilley ('Big Sue'), and Freud had this to say of her: 'She is, in her way, very feminine and, as she says, luckily she's got a sensible gene. Initially, being aware of all kinds of spectacular things to do with her size, like amazing craters and things one's never seen before, my eye was naturally drawn round to the sores and chafes made by weight and heat....'

Freud's last work, 'Portrait of the Hound', is a large unfinished canvas of David Dawson (Freud's assistant, model and friend) and his whippet Eli. Dawson, propped up on one elbow and cradling his knee with the other, gazes up at us; while a half-painted, sleek, fawn-and-white whippet lies next to him, staring mutely ahead.