Interview
'Lucian wanted us to have a baby'
C
elia Paul was a shy 18-year-old art student when she first met Lucian Freud. He was 54, and the towering genius of the British art world. But they bonded immediately: not over the obvious (Freud was almost as well known for his womanising as for painting) but over their mothers.
"That was our first connection," says Celia. "Lucian had done some wonderful paintings of his mother, and I found that my best work happened when my mother was my subject. Lucian's work was so intimate, so charged with feeling. I remember how deeply it affected me, and how keen I was to show him my own paintings of my mother."
For Celia, painting her mother had been a kind of epiphany. Aged 17, the daughter of an Anglican bishop, she had been talent-spotted by the director of the Slade art school in London and moved to study there.
But when she arrived, she found herself feeling lost and uninspired. "I felt I couldn't paint from a model because I didn't know the person, she meant nothing to me. Then I went home for a break and asked my mother to sit for me – and suddenly things started to work. I began to spend more time in Devon, where my family was living, so I could work from my mother."
On her trips to the Slade, she could not fail to notice Lucian Freud, who was a visiting tutor. It was 1978: he had already had several significant relationships and at the time fathered at least 12 children. Celia remembers plucking up the courage to speak to him for the first time. "I went up to him in the studio and asked if he was busy. He gave an amused laugh and said not at all. I didn't know it at the time, but I think the real reason he had gone to the Slade was that he was in search of a new girlfriend."
Freud invited Celia back to his flat and showed her the painting he was working on. But if he hoped she would melt into his arms, he was disappointed. "Lucian was used to women falling at his feet, but I certainly didn't do that. I was very serious about my art. So I resisted him, but felt compelled to see him as well. I found him so inspiring – he really helped my work."
Freud invited Celia back to his flat and showed her the painting he was working on. But if he hoped she would melt into his arms, he was disappointed. "Lucian was used to women falling at his feet, but I certainly didn't do that. I was very serious about my art. So I resisted him, but felt compelled to see him as well. I found him so inspiring – he really helped my work."
Within months, though, the two were lovers. She also became his model. But Freud was never monogamous. "We had a spiritual bond, and I think he wanted me to know I meant a great deal to him. He certainly respected my work. But he wasn't faithful to me, and I knew that."
For Celia, finding herself one among many women was painful but it plunged her back into a familiar landscape. She was one of five daughters; and so had always struggled to get a sense of her own identity. "When we were growing up, my mother would talk about 'all of you', and I was always being told how similar I was to one or other of my sisters. So I think finding myself in that situation with Lucian exposed an old hurt because I knew he had other girlfriends – and he also had daughters he was very invested in. So I became one among many women … and I knew exactly how that felt."
Most raw was a very deep memory of how the three-year-old Celia had felt when her mother, Pamela – to whom she was always very strongly attached – gave birth to her younger sister Kate. Celia was the fourth child, so the new baby meant she was being replaced, and with yet another daughter. "When that happened, I felt I was nothing," says Celia. "And I felt like that again with Lucian. It was incredibly painful. But I did love him, and he did reassure me that I was the main person in his life, so I stuck with it. But he was very secretive – that was part of his make-up – and it was traumatic for me, overhearing whispers and gossip about what he was getting up to with other women."
What did Celia's father, who was by now the Bishop of Bradford, make of his daughter's relationship? There wasn't much conversation about it, Celia remembers, but there was one dinner with her father and Freud. "My father asked if he should dress up in his bishop's gear and Lucian said he'd love that. We had a really good time; but afterwards my father said to me that Lucian was the most selfish man he'd ever met."
It was the death of Celia's father, in 1983, that prompted her to make a decision that would tie her to Freud for ever. She got pregnant: their son, Frank, Freud's youngest child, was born in 1984. "At that time Lucian and I were very close and my mother was completely grief-stricken over the loss of my father – I wanted the baby for her, to give her someone to go on living for. But it was also because I loved Lucian so much and he loved me, and he wanted us to have a baby."
Celia gave birth at the Portland hospital in London, paid for by Freud. Aged 24 at the time, she admits she had no idea what having a baby would be like. "I assumed I'd just hand the baby over to my mother and go on working. I was about to have my first solo show, so it was an exciting time."
Instead, Frank's birth brought a seismic shift in her perception of herself, and a crisis over work. "I knew I couldn't give up my painting and be there for him as I felt I should be."
She took just three weeks away from her easel and – leaving Frank with her mother in Cambridge – returned to her studio in London. "On the train back I was haunted every second by his little face. I was terribly torn, especially as I was having to give up breastfeeding, which I loved, but I knew I had to do it. I had to carry on painting, and it's not a nine-to-five job. You have to give yourself to it, and I couldn't look after a baby at the same time."
Freud, too, was taken aback by the effect of the baby's arrival on Celia. "He was traumatised by it – he thought I just wasn't there for him any more. Gradually I became aware that there was someone else in his life and in 1988 I found out who she was, and I decided to split up with Lucian. I felt a tremendous sense of grief"
Frank stayed with his grandmother in Cambridge, seeing Celia at weekends and when she visited. Things eased, she says, once he went to school. "And it meant my mother had more time to sit for me again because she wasn't so busy looking after Frank."
She painted her sisters, too: one work has all five of them in a line, wearing identical white shifts, sitting with their hands in front of them. But look more closely and you see that each one is subtly – and for her, of course, crucially – different. Jane (who is the wife of Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury) is holding her head in a particular way; Mandy has her feet turned out slightly; Lucy is turning her head at an angle; Kate has her legs arranged in a different way. In her work, and as a mother, she had finally found herself. Having Frank, she says, allowed her to think of herself as a separate entity for the first time.
Today, Celia lives in a flat in London, bought for her by Freud in 1982. It's a large flat, with a magnificent view of the British Museum, but Celia lives there in almost nun-like fashion. Her habit is a long, paint-splattered shift; her monastic cell is her studio, where there are bare floorboards and almost no furniture. She rarely goes out.
Frank is 27 and also an artist. Perhaps surprisingly, he feels his choice of career is unconnected to either of his parents: it was just, he said, that he always loved to draw. "I never needed any prompting to pick up a pencil: drawing was what made me feel happy and fulfilled," he says. He never asked his father for advice about his work, despite the fact that – as he grew up – he did get to know Freud, helped by the fact that Celia, after a long period of cool relations with his father, did eventually rekindle a friendship with him (she was one of the last people to see him on the day of his death last year).
But the relationship with his father was, he says, "always slightly distanced … conversation never flowed particularly freely between us."
Like many of Freud's children, he agreed to sit for him (some of them have said that sitting for their father was the only sure way to get any time with him). But, in Frank's case, no painting was ever finished. He slightly regrets it now. "I think now, maybe I should have taken more time to sit for him. But I was studying languages and had to keep going off to other countries."
His mother has painted him several times and would like to do more. They are very close, Frank says.
Celia's mother, her muse for 30 years, is in her mid-80s and now finds it too difficult to climb the 80 stairs to Celia's flat. But in the process of painting her, says Celia, maybe she finally managed to claim the undivided attention she had missed as the fourth of five daughters.
So will Frank become her main inspiration as a sitter? Celia thinks not. "It's not what he wants to do with his life," she says simply;what is left unsaid is that it is not what she wants him to do with it either.
And she has a new direction now – self-portraits. "I started doing them a few years ago. It took me that long to start thinking about myself and who I am," she says.
So her future will be working out who she is: not as a daughter, or as a sister, or as a lover, or even as a mother, but simply as herself.
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