He painted all day

IN 1939, Stephen Spender described a brilliant teenager with whom he had made friends. He was, the poet thought, ‘the most intelligent person I have met since I first knew Auden at Oxford. He looks like Harpo Marx and is amazingly talented and wise as well, I think’. This extraordinary youth was the 16-year-old Lucian Freud. More than 60 years later, Freud told me that of one thing he was sure: internally, he had never changed; at 80, he was the same person as he had always been.

Perhaps it was true in some ways, as in the extraordinary drive and energy he always directed towards his art. ‘He paints all day,’ Spender reported of the teenager; the same could be said of the octogenarian. In between, however,