Naked Portrait
30 May 2024Synopsis
A Guardian Top 50 Summer Read
'I ended up reading it in one sitting, well into the early hours of the following day.' - Observer
'I can’t think of an art book with an opening page like it. Lines land like detonation . . . The writing is hypnotic and propulsive . . . It’s so powerful, so horrible, the set-up compelling.’ - The Sunday Times
Cleaning the studio made me feel special, downtrodden and loved for all the wrong reasons. The floor was marked with a brush and thinned paint to establish the position of any furniture that was in use, the painted hieroglyphics of no particular colour but indelible so that everything could be repositioned and put back between sittings, all the functional lines alive and purposeful like his handwriting.
In Naked Portrait Rose Boyt explores her complicated relationship with her beloved father, Lucian Freud, through her diary and other accounts of sitting for him, naked or otherwise. Enthralled by his genius, it was only after his death that she began to question the version of events she had come to accept. The shock of the truth is profound but what emerges is her love and compassion not just for herself as a vulnerable young woman, but for the man himself, who is shown in all his brilliant complexity.
Details
30 May 2024
9781035024933Reviews
'One of the compulsive aspects of Boyt’s book is that, as a reader, you get to listen in on her trying to make honest sense of events that go well beyond what any daughter might be expected to fathom. I ended up reading it in one sitting, well into the early hours of the following day.'Tim Adams, The Observer
I can’t think of an art book with an opening page like it. Lines land like detonations . . . The writing is hypnotic and propulsive . . . It’s so powerful, so horrible, the set-up compelling.The Sunday Times
The reader is invited into the innermost intimacies of a private life, not just the scandalous details and long-held secrets, but the long waking hours, the temporal chasms between the more gossip-worthy parts of Boyt’s existence . . . Naked Portrait is a hall of mirrors with the young Boyt at its centre, surveyed from above by her now-66-year-old self. Its events juxtapose, clash and occasionally confuse, painting a portrait of Freud that’s even more revealing than his nude depiction of Rose. The Telegraph
Beyond the father-daughter dynamic is an evocative tale of coming of age in London in the 1980s, one marked by grief, bad boyfriends, sexual compromises and camaraderie. So much life worth telling, out beyond the shadows of great menHettie Judah, Times Literary Supplement
