All of these anecdotes and more are recounted in Geordie Greig’s Breakfast with Lucian. It is a page-turner of a book, part tabloid journalism, part overview of the world of gangsters, art dealers, and the aristocracy. Freud wallowed in society’s extremes and did not have much time for the middle classes. Ostensibly, this biography is about a small group of friends who would, usually individually, breakfast with Freud at Clarke’s restaurant on Kensington Church Street. The author, a former Tatler editor and a man of great tenacity, was one of this group. He first saw an exhibition of Lucian Freud’s paintings as a schoolboy, at Anthony d’Offay’s gallery in London. The painting that shocked him into becoming a lifelong fan was Naked man with rat. He immediately wrote to the artist and received no reply. He continued to be rebuffed for another twenty-five years – often, when phoning, with an abrupt ‘Fuck off’. Eventually, using the ruse of wanting to photograph the painter Frank Auerbach, he persuaded Freud to sit in on the portrait. Throughout his life it was Auerbach’s judgement more than anyone else’s that Freud most trusted about his own work.

Elsewhere, Greig describes how the breakfasts were initiated: ‘Lucian had first started going to the tiny front café in Clarke’s in 1989 with Leigh Bowery, the flamboyant Australian performance artist whose pierced cheeks and blond wig or bald pate made Lucian fade into anonymity beside him.’

Freud was always unconventional. Rather than work across the whole canvas with washes of colour or under-painting, he would start with one tiny point, an eyeball or a testicle, and paint that to a ‘finish’, before slowly and painstakingly working outwards until the whole canvas was complete. He would then demand payment upfront for it from whoever was his dealer at the time. ‘Lucian had fallen out with and left six dealers,’ Greig writes, ‘prior to joining [John] Acquavella’s stable in 1992.’ For much of his career, especially in comparison to his friend and rival Francis Bacon ‘he seemed an artist in the second division’.

Acquavella’s New York gallery, which is on East 79th Street, specialises in blue-chip modern – whole exhibitions by Monet, Degas, Cézanne, Picasso, and Léger. When Freud started painting the enormous figure of Leigh Bowery, it was too much for his then dealer, James Kirkman. ‘Who on earth will buy it?’ he asked in despair, while Freud’s ex-wife Caroline observed, ‘His penis was like a slug.’ Bowery’s own description of himself was as ‘an unusually big heifer carting around sixteen or seventeen stone’. Freud met Acquavella and his wife over an arranged lunch at an upmarket London restaurant. ‘How we gonna get out of this gracefully if he wants us to go back to the studio?’ Greig reports Acquavella saying to his wife. But they did, and the first thing Freud pulled out was a Bowery portrait with a leg raised. ‘Man, this is different from what I had in mind,’ the dealer mused.

Lucian holding a kestrel in Delamere Terrace, by Clifford Coffin for Vogue, 1948

Acquavella offered the picture called Nude with leg up to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC for $800,000. Suddenly everyone was buying Lucian Freud paintings, from Roman Abramovich ($25 million for Benefits supervisor) to the Art Gallery of Western Australia’s purchase of Naked portrait (1999). This deal was brokered by London’s leading gallerist Jay Jopling, famous for his stable of young British artists and his trademark ‘Joe 90’ glasses. When the Australian deal was complete, Freud sent him ‘a close-up of Leigh Bowery’s cock and balls’.

Robert Hughes, quoted in the book, wrote passionately about Freud:

Every inch of the surface has to be won, must be argued through, bares the traces of curiosity and inquisition … Nothing of this kind with Warhol or Gilbert and George or any of the other image-scavengers and recyclers who infest the wretchedly stylish woods of an already decayed, pulped-out postmodernism.

If you like informed gossip, you will enjoy this book and the many photographs of Lucian Freud at work. If you are more interested in process and artistic practice, you will enjoy Chapter Eight, simply called ‘Paint’. In the end, this is simply what obsessed Freud.