Lucian Freud at the National Gallery — a modern Old Master finds his natural home

Claiming to use the museum “as if it were a doctor”, Lucian Freud famously stalked the pictures at the National Gallery by night: “I come for ideas and help, to look at situations within paintings. Often these situations have to do with arms and legs, so the medical analogy is actually right.”

Freud was really stalking the five-century western figurative tradition, and positioning himself within an endeavour which, when he started out in postwar London, everyone else believed was finished. As the National Gallery’s beautifully installed and superbly selected retrospective shows, Freud’s singular achievement was to revive and renew an old-fashioned idiom — painting done from life — so deeply and grandly that his pictures are the essential visual record of how people in England in the past 70 years looked, felt and thought.

Incapable of a dull brushstroke, he made the ordinary iconic and monumental. Sue Tilley, a benefits supervisor from London, rolls on the floor, a mound of lumpen, livid flesh and twisting limbs, in “Evening in the Studio”. Bookie Alfie McLean, bulky, blotchy, unyielding, sits flanked by his lean, wary son in “Two Irishmen in W11”, before a vista of the capital’s terraces and tower blocks. In “Guy and Speck”, former jockey Guy Hart leans back, ample and edgy, caressing his bull terrier with one craggy hand, flashing a signet ring on the other. One hand alone took five weeks to paint.

Freud said that “one of the most exciting things is seeing through the skin to the blood and veins and markings”. That meticulous clarity levels the privileged and the everyday in spectacles of flesh and fabric, texture and weight, playfulness and gravitas. Life-size, Andrew Parker Bowles bulges out of his resplendent gold-braided, red-striped uniform in “The Brigadier”. A hefty, domed head of painter Frank Auerbach, dominated by his vast forehead, seems to depict the process of thought itself. In the magnificent central gallery, opposite giant cavorting figures in the studio, a tiny canvas mesmerises: beneath a flamboyant impasto diadem, gleaming against soft grey hair, “Queen Elizabeth II” stares out with resolve yet weariness, eyes bright, lips tight, skin crumpled — the most persuasive royal portrait in a century.

As all this suggests, no artist of the past hundred years — the show marks the centenary of his birth — stakes a place in the National Gallery more naturally than Freud; the resonance of his work with the collection thrills from the start.

In linearity, crisp contours, compressed graphic brilliance, youthful Freud is reminiscent of stark early Flemish and German Realism. His wide-eyed frightened first wife Kitty, “Girl with a Kitten” (1947), squeezing her pet so hard as to almost strangle it, recalls Holbein’s “A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling”. In “Girl with Roses”, Kitty again, every strand of hair is delineated in filigree strokes, and her expression terrified into an eerie stillness. “Man with a Thistle” is a pellucid self-portrait, taking anxiety from the prickly plant on a shelf, recalling the stone parapet in Renaissance portraits.

The hawkish look never changes, but as the self-portraits develop — the full-length nude, skin sagging, posture unsteady, brandishing a brush like a sword, of “Painter Working, Reflection” (1993); frail and determined at 80 against a rough pigment wall scraped on with a palette knife in “Self-portrait (Reflection)” (2002) — the comparison is with Rembrandt. Meanwhile, in multi-figure compositions from the 1970s on, as the nude becomes increasingly important, and paint is looser and more thickly applied, building up forms from colour, the extravagance and complexity looks Rubenesque.

In “Large Interior, London W9” (1973), a background nude battles for pictorial space with the foreground likeness of Freud’s elderly mother. (The women posed separately.) A crazy sequel, “Large Interior, Notting Hill” (1998) has a clothed man reading, a dog curled at his feet, and behind, Freud’s assistant and model David Dawson, naked, suckling a baby. Freud’s 1990s baroque splendour, shown to supreme effect than in these sumptuous galleries, crescendoes with Tilley reclining, a swollen nude beneath an antique rug, in “Sleeping by the Lion Carpet” — a touch of pageantry offsetting the forensically detailed figure.

Like his friend Francis Bacon, Freud understood that to “open the valve of sensation” was the way forward for figurative painting; what stuns still is how the intensified realism of awkwardly intimate scenes acquires psychological charge through his detachment. It is as unnerving in the show’s first marriage portrait — the crystalline “Hotel Bedroom” (1954), Freud a sinister silhouette standing at the window, coldly watching his golden-hued second wife Caroline Blackwood shuddering in bed — as in the last: enormous Leigh Bowery and sylphlike Nicola Bateman naked on a mattress, turned away from one another, in “And the Bridegroom” (1993).

The intensified realism of awkwardly intimate scenes acquires psychological charge through Freud’s detachment

Viewing his early alienated figures, Herbert Read named Freud “the Ingres of existentialism”. David Sylvester talked of his “genius for bringing out the worst in people”. Although Freud insisted on zoological metaphors — people as animals — his grandfather Sigmund’s psychoanalysis, the patient on the couch, inevitably comes to mind. The more acute the truth-telling, the more disconcertingly compelling the figures are, from exposed naked daughters — “Bella”, 27, defiantly holds her composure, but 14-year-old Annie tries to cover her nipples with her hair for the cruelly titled “Naked Child Laughing” — to Freud’s mother.

She was accepted as a model only after her suicide attempt, when she had become too passive to threaten him by her intuitive understanding. Her resigned intelligence and tenacious dignity inspired some of the greatest old-age portraits ever made, displayed here in a separate small room, whisperingly affecting.

Paint always confers power, but the sense of inquisitor and victims is extreme throughout. In “Reflection with Two Children (Self-Portrait)”, Freud disrupts conventional representation by depicting himself, through a mirror on the floor, as a monster stretching to the ceiling, towering over his tiny son and daughter. “Painter and Model” features Freud’s lover Celia Paul, brush in hand, bare foot suggestively squeezing a paint tube, concentrating on the naked, discomforted man, artist Angus Cook, lying before her. Both appear wretched, puppets in the presence of Freud, who is actually doing the painting.

Nothing else mattered. “I want to paint myself to death,” Freud said, and sure enough, days before he died in 2011, he was still attending to the whippet’s ear in “Portrait of the Hound”. Lovers, wives, children and dogs are absorbed into the work, whose arc is autobiographical even as it mirrors the variety and richness of the wider world. All his life Freud was becoming an Old Master; he is gloriously at home in Trafalgar Square now.

October 1-January 22, nationalgallery.org.uk

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