One of Lucian Freud's 14 children reveals how the artist painted him out of his life
Rapprochement: Artist Lucian Freud, pictured at his Holland Park home in London in 2003, was reunited with his estranged son, David, on his deathbed
The few hours he spent with the father he hardly knew were precious moments indeed and the 47-year-old might have been expected to use them to seek answers to the questions which had haunted him since childhood.
But instead, he took out his sketch pad and began frantically drawing his legendary artist father in his final hours, noting how the light played on his shrunken frame beneath the white sheets, how, even as death approached, his 88-year-old fathers piercing blue eyes shone out of his withered face.
Then David Freud stayed up all night painting, smearing oils with his bare hands onto a piece of canvas.
The result of his grief-stricken endeavours is a series of death-bed paintings which are now on display, giving an extraordinary insight into the painful legacy left behind by Freud, a serial womaniser who fathered at least 14 children by several different mothers and was virtually estranged from many of them.
Painting him helped me to come to terms with his loss, says David, a former travel agent who lives in Worthing, West Sussex, and is himself a father of four.
I felt he was more mine when he had died. I was able to digest him without barriers. He was more available to me! .
If Lucian Freud realised that the tables had been turned on him in his dying hours and that, as the end approached in July this year, he had himself become the artists model, he said nothing.
He was in the final agonising stages of bladder cancer which had spread throughout his body.
He found it difficult to speak, says David.
He has no childhood memories of Freud. He was born in 1964, at a time when it appeared that Freuds sexual appetite knew no bounds.
He already had two daughters, Annie and Annabel, from his first marriage to Kitty Garman, the daughter of! sculpto r Sir Jacob Epstein.
But at the same time the priapic painter was fathering five children by Suzy Boyt, a former student of his from the Slade Art School, he was also living with Davids mother, art student Katherine McAdam.
She gave birth to four of Freuds children, Jane, Paul, Lucy and, finally, David. He later sired Bella (now a fashion designer) and Esther (a novelist), who is the same age as David, by the writer and gardener Bernardine Coverley.
Freud also had a son, Frank, now 26, with the painter Celia Paul.
In his studio: Lucian Freud with naked sculptor Alexandra Williams-Wynn, the daughter of a baronet, in 2005. Alexandra had been romantically linked with the painter
But its not something thats particularly important, says David. I saved enough money from my days in business to be able to afford to paint.
He was still a baby when his mother finally tired of Freuds unfaithfulness and spirited away her four children to a council estate in Roehampton, South-West London.
At a very early age I buried the whole thing completely, he says. My mother didnt really talk about him and I didnt want to hurt her feelings by bringing up the subject. If anyone asked me where my father was, I said that he had died in the war.
Without the aid of his famous fathers rapidly burgeoning earnings (he was famed for his portraits of the Queen, a pregnant Kate Moss and a nude Jerry Hall), the famil! y often struggled to survive financially.
Looking in the mirror: The rediscovered 'Self-Portrait with a Black Eye' by Lucian Freud. His works have fetched millions over the years
But my mother was very loving and I was happy growing up without a father. Although I knew that he was my father, as a child I spent a long time not hoping for anything from him.
As a teenager, my way of raging was to lock it away, to be stubborn, to refuse to make the effort to call him up. When I started work, I was so busy, I put my father out of my head for a long time.
All of his siblings displayed artistic leanings, but while David briefly flirted with the idea of becoming an artist, the pressure to earn a living took him in another direction.
Having left a state boarding school for gifted children in Suffolk, he began his career in marketing at Pegasus Holidays before moving to work with Richard Branson, helping to set up Virgin Holidays.
Companion: Freud with his dog in 2001
Emma linked him up with his half-sisters Bella ! and Esth er. Several months later, Esther called him to say that Lucian wanted to see him.
I was very nervous about that meeting. I was happy but also very daunted. I didnt want to screw it up. I wanted him to like me.
He met his father at Marks Club, an exclusive private members club in Londons Mayfair.
David recalls that Freud seemed nervous at first and there were long pauses during their conversation. But there were also moments of familiarity that touched him.
He took some food off my plate and ate it, which made me smile, says David. He didnt try to hide behind niceties. He wasnt interested in that. I could tell by the way he looked at me that he wanted to engage with me and speak to me and that he was interested in knowing me.
He also noticed the astonishing likeness between himself and his father. It was like looking in a mirror, he says.
Frightened of raising subjects that might be too delicate, David says he talked about his current life. I didnt want to bring up all the emotions about the past or his relationship with my mother.
But he recalls how Freud admitted to him I am very selfish without apologising for this character trait.
What he meant, he says with a level of understanding that many will find hard to fathom, is that he took himself seriously as the consummate artist. When you give so much to one field, other fields have to suffer.
David continues: He never pretended to be anything other than what he was. All the women he was with chose to be in relationships with him. One thing my mother said about him was that he was always honest with her. He didnt lie.
Naked ambition: A copy picture of Lucian Freud's pa! inting o f his daughter Bella which was auctioned as part of a Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale in 2005
He said that we would meet again, says David. Afterwards, I wrote him a letter about how I felt about meeting him. He sent me a hand-written note back saying that he had read it carefully.
But the handful of meetings that followed were sporadic and largely concerned discussions about providing some financial stability for Davids mother.
When she walked out on Freud in the 1960s, she had left behind a self-portrait he had given her, which later sold for several million pounds.
After meeting David, Freud offered to do a new painting for her, but in the end gave Davids mother the 40,000 he had inherited from his own mother, Lucy, upon her death in 1989.
It was around a decade ago, when his own marriage broke down, that David finally poured out his feelings to Freud in a heartfelt letter.
I wrote about my disappointment that he hadnt made himself available to me. I was in emotional turmoil at the time. There were a lot of feelings from my childhood.
This time, Freud didnt respond: There wasnt really anything he could say, says David. It was just overdue adolescent rage.
Youthful: Freud as a young boy in an undated picture
But the letter suddenly placed a barrier down between father and son. Our relationship needed work and neither of us put that work in, says David.
Perhaps we were both too stubborn. Looking back, I think it would have been very difficult to forge a closer relationship with him because we werent given the opportunity to bond at an early age.
It was last July, while attending the annual summer party thrown by Emma Freuds! PR guru brother Matthew and his wife Elisabeth Murdoch (daughter of the media tycoon Rupert) at their Cotswold home, that David learned his father was terminally ill and had only weeks to live.
Ten years had passed since their last meeting and David went straight to Freuds home in Kensington, West London. He was very ill and that was shocking, he says.
I still had an image of him in my mind as this very powerful, chiselled man, always in control. His fragility touched me. But he was also very lucid. His eyes were still very bright.
While he sketched his dying father, David also fed him cherries.
When David got up to leave, his father weakly asked him to keep talking. David recalls: I really cherished the feeling that he wanted me around. It was like being given a gift from him.
When David finally left later that evening, he returned home and started painting his fathers image onto the canvas.
Over the next few days and weeks, he painted further portraits of his father. In one painting, Freud is depicted reaching out towards his son a fictional image which David refers to as wish- fulfilment.
According to David, his father never tried to hide his faults but nor did he apologise for them.
Eye for human form: Freud's 'Naked Portrait With Reflection' which went under the hammer at Christie's in 2008
The exhibition is entitled Losing Lucian Paintings From Lucian Freuds Death Bed. Collectors have already snapped up the entire collection.
David went to see his father one final time before his d! eath, bu t by then Freud had lapsed into unconsciousness and died two days later.
The irony is, of course, that he never got to see his artist sons work. Maybe he wouldnt have liked it, says David. And that would have been hard for me but, at the end, he was interested in my work.
With so much left unsaid between father and son, David believes his paintings have given him the voice denied to him as a child.
I couldnt translate into words what I wanted to say, he says. The process of making art is a way of bypassing all the petty concerns. And in the end, I wouldnt want to be a different child or for him to have been a different father.
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