Lucian Freud: Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

Sitting for Lucian Freud was quite a commitment. Unlike Hockney, whom he painted and who painted him, Freud was a very slow painter and he was methodical. Paying close attention to detail and absorbed by different textures, he was intent on building up surfaces meticulously, layer upon layer. This meant that sessions would usually go on for several months, sometimes years. And because Freud felt that their presence affected the surrounding space, like the ripple effect on water, he even required his sitters to continue to sit for him even if he was occupied with painting the crumbling plaster of his studio wall.

For Freud (pictured below right: Reflection [Self-Portrait], 1985) verisimilitude was paramount – naturally he was a truth-seeker. But you can say that's the case with most portrait artists. What marked Freud out – or at least just one of the things that marked him out – was his strangeness, and this belies any straightforward description of him as a realist painter.

This strangeness, which is both seductive and unnerving (and later, even repellent in its perceived cruelties), was at its most striking at the beginning of his career, when he was painting highly stylised portraits. But it was an inclination toward dramatic peculiarities that never deserted him. With over 100 paintings and works on paper taking us through seven decades of Freud’s career, this brilliant and captivating exhibition does justice to that singular and abiding vision of arresting oddness.   

We begin not at the beginning, but with a series of etchings from the Eighties and Nineties which you can see just at the entrance to the exhibition. In these mostly close-up portrait heads in compressed spaces we find Lord Goodman in His Yellow Pyjamas. His head viewed from below, it’s clearly a likeness that’s designed to suggest a striking resemblance to an imperious walrus. Humans are just a species of animal, Freud had often remarked, and although none of the early portraits are nudes, we see this most evidently when the human animal is unclothed.