Synopsis
Read by the author, Rose Boyt.
‘Towards the end of the summer of 2016 I found an old diary in a cardboard box, hundreds of typed pages, the first dated 9 September 1989. I put the diary away without reading it; I had lost my father, my mother had died only three months earlier, and it was not the right time to think about anything. I was heartbroken.
As I remembered it the diary was about sitting again, an easy portrait this time, fully clothed, the manuscript mainly a record of my father’s remarkable stories. I imagined all his stories were amusing, uncontentious, but even if that had been true I still would not have been ready. It is unclear to me now how I was able so effectively to distort reality.’
In Naked Portrait Rose Boyt explores her complicated relationship with her beloved father, Lucian Freud, through the 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
9781035024940Reviews
'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
