He painted Kate Moss and a slumbering benefits supervisor, but the late artist Lucian Freud also often painted his family and called his work "purely autobiographical".
An exhibition at The Freud Museum marking the centenary of his birth examines his complicated relationships with his parents, grand-father Sigmund, and numerous children. Exhibits include childhood holiday snaps, illustrated letters, and footage of him in the gardens of Sigmund's homes in Elsworthy Road and Maresfield Gardens.
A painting of his mother Lucie is hung above the famous psychoanalyst's couch in his grandfather's Belsize Park study, while artworks of children Esther and Bella Freud, and Susie and Ali Boyt appear alongside his only surviving sculpture of a horse, made while a pupil at Dartington Hall.
Exhibition curator Martin Gayford said the artist would not have approved of his work being shown in Sigmund's former home.
"He didn't like emphasising the connection with his grandfather. When he was young and starting out, having a near relation who was world famous was a bit of a handicap, lest people suspect he was trading on his connection."
Unsettled by Nazi antisemitism, Freud's architect father Ernst moved his wife and three sons from Berlin to St John's Terrace, in St John's Wood in 1933.
"It must have been a shock. He and his brothers found themselves at Dartington and didn't speak any English, but he later said Adolf Hitler had unwittingly played a lucky role in his life because he moved to London which he found the most fascinating city in the world," adds Gayford.
When Sigmund and daughter Anna fled Austria in 1938, Ernst arranged the purchase of Maresfield Gardens and would often visit before Sigmund's death a year later. Child therapist Anna stayed on in the house, and although she bought a painting of a palm tree at Lucian's first exhibition in 1944, he called her "my horrible aunt" and wrote negatively in letters about her projects.
"They both had an interest in slum children but she wanted to reform them and he rather liked their wildness," says Wildness.
Sigmund however, he found "warm and affectionate with a great sense of humour," unlike Ernst, who is described by Lucian's daughter Annie as "controlled and controlling."
"Lucien wouldn't have liked that very much, he was very wild as a child," says Gayford adding that it was a contrast to Lucie's doting permissive parenting.
"For him everything came down to Lucie. Her parents were wealthy, she was a product of the liberal Weimar era, a highly educated graduate who channelled her ambitions into Lucian and was quite explicit about him being her favourite. He found her interest in him unbearable and wanted to escape from her. 'Allein' (alone) was the first word he spoke."
Lucie's favouritism was the root of Lucian and brother Clement's mutual hatred, says Gayford. But while Ernst was against him becoming an artist, Lucie's desperation to see him as a painter made him "feel sick." Her suffocating enthusiasm almost pushing him into his alternative profession - as a jockey.
But after cutting her out of his life, she later became his most frequent model.
"After Ernst's death in 1970 she became suicidal and catatonic. He found her much easier to handle in that broken state and would take her for breakfast followed by for a painting session, he even painted her on her death bed."
The artist famously fathered numerous children with wives and lovers but didn't live with any of them. Son Ali Boyt says when his mother Suzy complained about him seeing anther woman "she never saw him for six months so didn't mention it again".
"They had four children but I never saw them together. He must have come and gone in the night," he says.
Ali was unaware of his connection to Sigmund Freud: "My ancestry was never mentioned. My grandmother died when I was 30 but he never introduced me. Once I visited my dad in his studio in Maida Vale, I arrived as she was leaving, but he never said anything. He kept us compartmentalised, there wasn't much of a sense of family."
Freud's way of bonding with his children was by inviting them to sit - including Highgate author Esther Freud and Hampstead author Susie Boyt. Several say that's when they felt closest to him. When Ali developed a drug problem and spent time in prison, his father responded by painting him with one clear eye and one unfocused.
"After a conversation with one of my sisters, she said maybe his parenting could have been better, so he brought me in to paint me. In his strange way he loved me. I didn't feel ignored. He used to come and visit me in rehab and when my therapist told him my problem was I was addicted to obsessive love, he replied 'obsessive love is the finest thing a man can experience.' I am more like him than I should be."
Gayford an art critic who wrote about sitting for Freud in Man With A Blue Scarf, describes an unconventional, flamboyant storyteller who fell out with many, yet hated being the object of attention - he once witnessed him throw bread rolls at a stranger who tried to photograph him in a restaurant.
"He decided who he liked and who he didn't and when he fell out with people, he did his best to stay fallen out. He said things that were so cutting, but his behaviour was often not unkind, there were small acts of kindness and generosity."
If Lucian's love life was "complicated and not very satisfactory," his work life was as a driven perfectionist. Once asked if he was a good painter, he replied "if I lived to be 300 I would be." He would only show his finished work to oldest friend and fellow German-British painter Frank Auerbach, whom he "trusted and respected."
Despite early success in mid career, Freud fell out of fashion and worked in his Paddington studio "in relative obscurity, slowly producing pictures no-one much wanted," says Gayford. An inveterate gambler, he lived off "other people's money", and despite loathing therapy in all its guises, was subsidised by the rights from Sigmund's works which were left to the family. But by the time of his death he lived his Holland Park and left his multi-million pound fortune to 10 of his 14 children.
Gayford sees some affinity between Sigmund and Lucian Freud - the artist doing visually what the other did through his analysis: "He said the painter should try and find out everything about the sitter to use what was most useful for the picture. He made all sorts of observations, tried different expressions and chose the one that made the best possible picture."
Freud Museum Director Carol Siegel agrees: "While Lucian was hostile to psychoanalysis and rejected his grandfather's works, his paintings try to get to the essence of a person, which is not dissimilar to the psychoanalytic process."
Lucian Freud, The Painter and His Family runs at The Freud Museum until Jan 2023. Visit www.freud.org.uk/
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