Man with a Blue Scarf - On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud (1922–2011), considered by many to be the greatest figurative painter of his time, spent seven months painting a portrait of art critic Martin Gayford. The daily account of their sittings takes the reader into the artist’s most private space – the studio – and into the very core of this modern master’s working methods, both the technical and the more subtly psychological.

In Man with a Blue Scarf, not only does an understanding of what a portrait is emerge; something else is also created: a portrait in words of Freud himself. The book is not a biography but a series of close-ups of the artist at work and in conversations in restaurants, taxis, and his studio. It is illustrated with works and evocative photographs of Lucian Freud in his studio, as well as images of artists from the past, including Vincent van Gogh and Titian, whom Freud and Gayford discuss in the book.