The sitters did not slash them, let alone destroy them. Yet all these disturbing portraits still exist. Out of this unflattering tradition came Velázquez's meaty Pope Innocent X, which inspired Francis Bacon's popes. Even Raphael, so charming to patrons, portrayed them boldly: he captured for all time the fat gangster face of Pope Leo X. His portrait of Pope Paul III depicts the old pontiff as weak, dying, perhaps senile. In his portrait of Jacopo de Strada (who, like Bernard Breslauer, was a rich antiques dealer), Titian emphasises the man's hard nose and coldly glaring, almost murderous eye. Sometimes, centuries later, the insult is clearly visible. Great portrait painters have always risked this kind of truth-telling. Without being especially ugly, he looks dismal: an average ruin. It's quite conventional, ordinary even - but the man's flesh is so mottled and weary, his nose so shiny, his mouth such a grimly metal-and-satin orifice, his chin so wobbly. There is not the severe cropping that makes Freud's head of the Queen so shocking. Rothschild is allowed to keep his clothes on. By Freud's standards, this is not a very cruel picture. The experience must be incredibly painful.Ī couple of days ago, I happened to be looking at his 1989 painting Man in a Chair, a portrait of the 4th Baron Rothschild, in the National Portrait Gallery. Imagine living with any of his paintings and comparing your actual body with his depiction of it, in those grey and salmon oils.
And yet, when you look at a Freud portrait, there doesn't need to be any particular blemish, or ugliness, to account for its disturbing the sitter. Reports have stressed Breslauer's baldness and sagging lower face, as if this might explain his dislike of the painting. I bet the Queen wishes she could get away with it.
No - the surprise is that more people don't slash or burn the results after they sit for this inconvenient truth-teller. The news this week that the millionaire antiquarian book dealer Bernard Breslauer destroyed a portrait of himself painted by Freud in the 1950s, just because he didn't like the way his chin looked, is therefore not a surprise. But no artist who made a living primarily by portraying live people has ever been quite as systematically unkind to them. In the history of the portrait, there have been many great, courageous and consequently unflattering paintings. There are no flights of fancy in his art, almost no imagination, you might say, at the risk of being misunderstood - only remorseless fact. It is literally all he seems to care about. Lucian Freud is an obsessively truthful painter.
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