Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud

Man with a Blue Scarf is a book unlike any other: the inside story of how it feels to pose for a remarkable artist, and to be transformed into a work of art. Full of wry and revealing observations, this is among the most original, enjoyable and informative books about art.

Lucian Freud, widely regarded as the greatest figurative painter of our time, spent seven months painting a portrait of the art critic Martin Gayford.

The daily narrative takes the reader into that most private place, the artist’s studio and to the heart of the working methods of this modern master – both technical and subtly psychological. From this emerges an understanding of what a portrait is, but something else is also built up: a portrait, in words, of Freud himself.

This is not a biography, but a series 
of close-ups: the artist at work, and in conversation in restaurants, taxis and his studio. It takes the reader into the company of a painter for whom Picasso, Giacometti, Francis Bacon, George Orwell and W.H. Auden were friends and contemporaries.

The book is illustrated with many of Lucian Freud’s other 
works, among them an etching 
for which Gayford posed after the painting was completed. Photographs taken by David Dawson of Freud at work are here as well as images by earlier artists discussed by Freud with Gayford such as Van Gogh and Titian.

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Authors Biography

Martin Gayford is a critic, writer and curator. Among his previous books are The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin and 
Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles and Constable in Love. In 2009 he was co-curator of the exhibition ‘Constable Portraits’ at the National Portrait Gallery, London. In the past he has been art critic of the Spectator and Sunday Telegraph and is now 
chief art critic for Bloomberg News.

Artists Biography

(b Berlin, 8 Dec 1922. d 20 July 2011). British painter and draughtsman. He was the son of the architect Ernst Freud (1892–1970) and the grandson of SIGMUND FREUD. His family moved to England in 1932, and in 1939 he became a naturalized British subject and enrolled at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, Dedham, run by Cedric Morris. Apart from a year in Paris and Greece, Freud spent most of the rest of his career in Paddington, London, an inner-city area whose seediness is reflected in Freud’s often sombre and moody interiors and cityscapes. In the 1940s he was principally interested in drawing, especially the face, as in Naval Gunner (1941; priv. col., see Gowing, pl. 22), and occasionally using a distorted style reminiscent of George Grosz, as in Page from a Sketchbook (1941; priv. col., see Gowing, pl. 17). He began to turn his attention to painting, however, and experimented with Surrealism, producing such images as the Painter’s Room (1943; priv. col., see Gowing, pl. 26), which features an incongruous arrangement of objects, including a stuffed zebra’s head, a battered chaise longue and a house plant, all of which survived his Surrealist phase and appeared separately in later paintings. He was also loosely associated with Neo-Romanticism, and the intense, bulbous eyes that characterize his early portraits show affinities with the work of other artists associated with the movement, such as John Minton, whose portrait he painted in 1952 (London, Royal Coll. A.). He established his own artistic identity, however, in meticulously executed realist works, imbued with a pervasive mood of alienation. He was dubbed by Herbert Read ‘the Ingres of existentialism’ (Contemporary British Art, Harmondsworth, 1951, rev. 1964, p. 35) because of such images as those of his first wife, Kitty (the daughter of Jacob Epstein), nervously clutching a rose in Girl with Roses (1947–8; London, Brit. Council).

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