Sigmund's grandson

The painter Lucian Freud, profiled in the latest issue of Vanity Fair:

Freud liked to call himself a biologist at heart, and he applied himself to his work with the discipline and rigor of a scientist in a lab. Each day, he tore a clean piece of white cotton sheeting from the pile of rags he kept in the studio—decommissioned hotel sheets purchased in bulk from a recycling business—and tucked it under his belt to serve as an apron. He wiped his brush clean after each individual brushstroke, painstakingly remixing the colors on the heavy palette he held in his right hand. (Freud painted left-handed.)

There was an ulterior motive beyond sociability to all this lavishing of attention: “He would be watching you the whole time, so he’d get a bigger understanding of what he was painting,” says Dawson. The biologist in him wanted to subject the sitter to a variety of conditions: hungry, caffeinated, tired, peeved, slightly drunk. “The time he used to like me most was if I had a hangover,” says Cozette McCreery, the subject of the painting Irish Woman on a Bed (2003–4), who met the artist while working as an assistant to his daughter Bella. “I asked, ‘Is that because I’ll just sit here and shut up?’ And he was like, ‘No, no, you have a sort of glow!’ ”

An earlier post on the artist here.