ROSE BOYT’S MEMOIR, Naked Portrait, is, in the narrowest sense, her account of sitting for three paintings for her father, Lucian Freud. In the first, she sprawls, unclothed, legs spread wide on her father’s chaise, aged 18. In the second, at 30, she is buttoned up in a dark shirt, hair cropped, refusing the artist’s gaze. And in the third, at 39, she perches in a homemade floral patterned dress on a sofa arm, beside her husband, Mark Pearce, his son Alex and their new baby, Stella.
You might say that the loose triptych represents a sort of allegory of independence for Boyt, from the wildly overbearing legacy of her father, and in some ways her book has that sort of triumphant, survivor’s note. But, as with anything concerning Freud, the reality is more complicated.
Boyt, one of Freud’s 14 acknowledged children, is now 65. She has a special place in the pantheon of heirs in that Freud chose her, alongside a lawyer, to be the co-executor of his £96m ($120m) estate, a process that has occupied her for a great deal of the 13 years since his death. One way of thinking about her memoir might be as a climax to that other consuming task. Plenty of people have had their say on Freud’s entirely singular life (“I don’t read any of that crap,” Boyt says) but no one is better placed than her – also the author of three novels of chaotic families – to weigh its extremes.
At the heart of her memoir is a diary she kept when sitting for the middle portrait, which she has now re-examined in light of her own experience of parenting, therapy and #MeToo: “Until I had read the diary I had completely forgotten all that sex talk [with Dad],” she writes, of her father’s
