Personal life

According to rumour Lucian Freud has up to 40 illegitimate children, acknowledging them only when they have become adults. Fourteen children have been identified, two from Freud's first marriage and 12 by various mistresses. Lucian Michael Freud  had 4 children by Suzy Boyt, 4 by Katherine McAdam (died 1998), 2 by Bernardine Coverley (died 2011), 1 by Jacquetta Eliot, Countess of St Germans and 1 by Celia Paul. His children include:

1. Annie Freud (born 1948)

2. Annabel Freud (born 1952)

3. Alexander Boyt (born 1957)

4. Jane McAdam Freud (born 1958)

5. Paul McAdam Freud (born 1959)

6. Rose Boyt

7. Lucy McAdam Freud (born 1961) married Peter Everett; 2 children

8. Bella Freud (born 1961) married James Fox; 1 child

9. Isobel Boyt (born 1961)

10. Esther Freud (born 1963) married David Morrissey; 3 children

11. David McAdam Freud (born 1964), 4 children. Partner of Debbi Mason

12. Susie Boyt (born 1969) married to Tom Astor; 2 children

13. Francis Michael Eliot (born 1971)

14. Frank Paul (born 1984); 1 child

After an affair with Lorna Garman, he went on to marry, in 1948, her niece Kathleen "Kitty" Epstein, daughter of sculptor Jacob Epstein and socialite Kathleen Garman. They had two daughters, Annie and Annabel Freud, and the marriage ended in 1952 when he began an affair with Lady Caroline Blackwood, another socialite.. Kitty Freud, later known as Kitty Godley (after her marriage in 1955 to economist Wynne Godley), died in 2011.

Freud was in love with Guinness heiress and writer Lady Caroline Blackwood. They married in 1953. They had a tumultuous, six-year-long marriage and divorced in 1959.

Early career

In 1943, the poet and editor Meary James Thurairajah Tambimuttu commissioned the young artist to illustrate a book of poems by Nicholas Moore entitled The Glass Tower. It was published the following year by Editions Poetry London and comprised, among other drawings, a stuffed zebra and a palm tree. Both subjects reappeared in The Painter's Room on display at Freud's first solo exhibition in 1944 at the Alex Reid & Lefevre Gallery. It contained most of the work that was shown more than fifty years later in Edinburgh. Critics and patrons were treated to an unknown talent that moved skillfully from expressionism to surrealism. In these early years, Freud produced portraits and still life's—the latter being mostly dead birds. One of these, Dead Heron, has been called by Bruce Bernard, in an essay on the painter, "the first seriously beautiful painting that Freud achieved. Freud could never paint or draw an animal, however long dead, without conveying a sense of its once personal life." This is no idle comment when one considers the direction of Freud's work toward realism. After the Second World War, Freud traveled first to Paris then to Greece where he visited the painter John Craxton, with whom he shared an exhibition in 1947 at the London Gallery. In 1947, Freud married Kitty Garman. For a time, she was his most important model. Her portraits demonstrate the refining of his style and subject matter. Much as Bernard perceived the subject's inner life in Freud's paintings of animals, Freud's realism would also be defined by his ability to transmit the inner personality of the subject. This was due, in part, to the fact that many of his models were friends and family members. Clearly Freud's star was rising. In the early fifties he was a frequent visitor to Dublin where he would share Patrick Swift's studio. In late 1952, Freud and Lady Caroline Blackwood eloped to Paris where they married in 1953. He remained a Londoner for the rest of his life.

Freud was one of the founders of the so-called School of London, a group of artists dedicated to figurative realism, considered somewhat reactionary at the time because it eschewed the presence of avant-garde movements at the time, such as Minimalism, Pop, and Conceptual art. This was more a loose collection of individual artists who knew each other, some intimately, and were working in London at the same time in the figurative style (but during the boom years of abstract painting). The group was led by figures such as Francis Bacon and Freud, and included Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, Leon Kossoff, Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde, Reginald Gray and Kitaj himself. He was a visiting tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art of University College London from 1949 to 1954.