He Paid His Bookie With His Paintings

Nick Smith

Lucian Freud, Telegraph 2007, 2017

Lawrence Alkin Gallery

Lucian Freud, Reflection (Self-portrait), 1981–2. © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images. Photo by John Riddy. Courtesy of Phaidon.

Alfie McLean, who founded A. McLean Bookmakers in Northern Ireland in 1962, allowed the famed British painter to repay (some) of his debts in paintings instead of pounds. When McLean died in 2006, he’d amassed about 23 artworksworth around £100 million. This association was just one of Freud’s many relationships with the United Kingdom’s underworld.

McLean, for example, is the subject of several Freud portraits. One, entitled The Big Man (1976–77), features a thick-necked man slouched in an armchair, clad in a double-breasted suit. In Breakfast with Lucian: The Astounding Life and Outrageous Times of Britain’s Great Modern Painter(2013), author Geordie Greig writes of the painting: “Every fold of his tight-fitting suit adds to the tension of this very bulky man trapped in this space.…A sense of physical threat hovers; this is not someone to fall out with over bad debts, and luckily they never did.”

Lucian Freud was one of the major figurative painters of the 20th century. Working in an uncompromisingly confrontational style, his portraits and nudes were rendered with a thickly laden brush. Often painting himself, as well as family and friends his works are imbued with a distinctive psychological space. Painted under intense direct observation, usually over the course of many sittings, Freud observed of his practice: “The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes and, ironically, the more real.” Born on December 8, 1922 in Berlin, Germany he was the grandson of the famed psychologist Sigmund Freud. In 1933, he moved with his family to London to escape the persecution of Jews by the Nazi regime. He went on to study at the Central School of Art and Goldsmiths College, befriending Francis Bacon and associating with a group of figurative artists working in London during the late 1940s. During the course of his career he achieved widespread success and critical acclaim, notably painting a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II between 2000 and 2001. The artist died on July 20, 2011 at the age of 88 in London, United Kingdom. Today, his works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Tate Gallery in London, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, among others.

Freud’s portrait of Gayford, Man with a Blue Scarf, 2004.

JOHN RIDDY/©2010 LUCIAN FREUD/COURTESY THAMES & HUDSON/PRIVATE COLLECTION

Private: Lucian Freud spoke candidly about his gambling problem

Artist Lucian Freud ran up half a million pounds in gambling debts with gangland crime lords the Kray brothers.

Britain’s most renowned living artist said the brothers ‘forced’ money on him to feed his addiction, but he was only able to repay them in small amounts.

The 87-year-old confessed he once cancelled an exhibition out of fear they would demand more money if they saw he was earning.

The situation got so bad that at one point he received a warning from the police.

In a revealing interview, the notoriously private artist discussed the nights he spent in police cells for fighting, his relationship with Kate Moss and how he escorted Greta Garbo to nightclubs.

‘She was the most famous person in the world at that stage. I was very young, she was in her late thirties,’ he said of the actress.

‘The people in the clubs could not believe it.’

.

Artist and gambler: Freud in 1958

A self-portrait of Freud nursing a black eye after a punch-up with a taxi driver sold for more than £2.8 million last month

He also explained his reasons for stopping gambling: ‘As I got more money, they wouldn’t take the bets and it just became pointless.

‘If I’d been in very high-powered card games with grand, rich people, perhaps, but that wasn’t what I did.’

The artist also disclosed he has four new muses: he is painting his assistant David Dawson; artist and printmaker Perienne Christian, 26; and two restaurateurs – Jeremy King, co-owner of The Wolseley where Freud frequently eats, and Sally Clarke, owner of Clarke’s in Kensington.

Artist and gambler: Freud in 1958

.Freud reveals their naturalization was made possible by the intervention of the Duke of Kent.

Freud’s painting Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, a life-size portrait of Jobcentre worker Sue Tilley, sold for £17.2million in 2008.

It set the world record for the highest price paid in an auction for a work of art by a living artist.

He remains ambitious though, adding: I work every day and night. I don’t do anything else. There is no point otherwise.’

This month, a self-portrait of Freud nursing a black eye after a punch-up with a taxi driver sold for more than £2.8million at auction.

The artist has previously discussed his habit of getting into scrapes, saying: ‘I used to have a lot of fight