Artist Lucian Freud’s legacy of sex and sorrow

One would expect the daughter of artist Lucian Freud — and great-granddaughter of the father of modern psychology Sigmund — to cut a Bohemian dash, and Bella Freud, 56, certainly doesn’t disappoint.

The gamine fashion designer has dumped her 72-year-old husband for an artist who is 22 years her junior.

But then a lust for life is in the genes. Bella’s father was a promiscuous, louche, charismatic and utterly selfish man who had as many as 500 lovers. His female subjects were often his romantic partners, or became his lovers after sitting for him. Some went on to have children by him.

Lucian married twice, and had two daughters by his first wife, Kitty Garman, none by his second, society beauty Lady Caroline Blackwood, but at least 12 illegitimate children by five mistresses. Some friends estimate he may have fathered as many as 40.

A ruthless seducer with no interest in conventional family life, in one year alone, 1961, Freud had three children by as many different women.

By the time he died in 2011, at the age of 88, he had acknowledged 14 children — the oldest now 69 and the youngest 33. Ten of them inherited his £42 million (after tax) estate.

Some were only vaguely aware of each other’s existence. So who are these children, and what is his dynastic legacy? The answer is that the Freuds are the most unlikely clan, artists galore of all different stripes, with a dizzying number of divorces, scandals and family disasters between them. Indeed, barely a single marriage has stayed the course.

His two daughters by his first wife

During his five-year marriage (1947-1952) to Kitty Garman, the illegitimate daughter of sculptor Jacob Epstein, Freud had two daughters, Annie and Annabel, his only legitimate children.

Andrew Tift’s triptych of Lucian Freud’s first wife, Kitty, which won the BP Portrait Award

1. Troubled poet whom Daddy painted nude

Annie, who was born in 1948, was painted nude by her father at the age of 14, for his 1963 portrait Naked Child Laughing. She recalled him moving her hair off her nipples with his paintbrush.

‘There was some hurt done, not intentionally, and it was nothing to do with sex — perhaps it was more an intrusion into innocence. It was all very well for Dad to say it was all right. No one else felt that it was,’ she said recently.

She became an embroiderer and then worked in local government. She is now a poet.

Poet Annie was painted nude by her father when she was aged 14 and recalls him moving her hair away from her nipples with a paintbrush

Annie lives in Dorset with her second husband, a retired electrical engineer, whom she met on the internet. Her daughter May, 42, by her French-born first husband Jean-Loup Courret, lives in Suffolk. Lucian was furious when Annie wouldn’t let May — his granddaughter — pose for him at the age of six. She was shocked when she discovered the existence of her half-siblings and felt ‘anchorless’ over Freud’s betrayal — suffering a nervous breakdown.

2. Daughter and muse

Freud painted Annabel (four years Annie’s junior) both clothed and nude, as a child and later as an adult woman in 1988’s Annabel Sleeping, which shows her in a blue dressing gown. Annabel married an architect in 1974, with whom she has a daughter, Katie Louise, 34.

Today, she lives in a modest flat in Tulse Hill, South London.

Annabel was painted both clothed and nude by her father. She now lives in a flat in Tulse Hill, South London

His four children by beatnik lover

Lucian Freud took Suzy Boyt as his lover when she was his student at the Slade School of Fine Art. Between 1957 and 1969, she had four children with him. Suzy gave up painting to raise them and for a time supported the family by selling antique lace. She then bought a cargo ship and took her children around the world. In Trinidad, the boat fell into disrepair and the family was deported, penniless, to start again in London.

Suzy Boyt became Freud’s lover when she was his student at the Slade School of Fine Art

1. The wild teen turned drugs counsellor

Alexander Boyt, known as Ali in the family was — according to his siblings — a wild teenager. Aged 16, he was said to have got drunk in France and got into a fight with a group of Hell’s Angels who tried to stab him.

Alexander Boyt works with people who struggle with substance abuse and lives in Islington, North London

He once set up a skate park and now, aged 60, works with drug and alcohol abusers. He lives alone in Islington, North London.

Lucian used him as a model several times. He recalls: ‘I once apologised to Dad for something I did, and he replied, “That’s nice of you to say, but it doesn’t work like that. There is no such thing as free will. People just have to do what they have to do”.’

2. Chippy punk author

Rose Boyt provoked pointed references to great-grandfather Sigmund when her first novel, Sexual Intercourse, was published in 1990. It was about a girl and her sexually charged relationship with her father. A punk teenager, she says she had a chip on her shoulder because her family was ‘really poor’.

Rose Boyt’s first novel, Sexual Intercourse, was published in 1990, provoking pointed references to her great-grandfather Sigmund Freud

‘I was extremely anti-social. I stayed out all night and took drugs,’ she said.

Her father painted her nude, for 1979’s Portrait Of Rose, when she was 19, a portrait she describes as ‘crew cut, open legs, naked’.

Her most recent novel is How’s Your Father. Now 58, she lives in Islington with husband Mark Pearce. They have two children.

3. Mum of a pop star

Isobel Boyt (known as Ib), 56, was painted by Lucian with her partner Paul Costelloe while pregnant in 1992 — the picture, Ib And Her Husband, is worth around £18 million. She has three daughters and her Facebook page suggests she lives in Athens. One daughter, Alice, was in the moderately successful band Big Deal.

Isobel Boyt was painted by Lucian with her partner Paul Costelloe. Her daughter Alice went on to form the band Big Deal

4. Satirist of middle-class yummy mummies

Susie Boyt, 47, a novelist and style columnist for the Financial Times, is the youngest of the Boyt brood and says her sister Rose largely brought her up. She went to Oxford University but was devastated when her boyfriend died in a climbing accident.

Susie Boyt is a novelist and style columnist for the Financial Times. She is a graduate of Oxford University

She is married to Tom Astor, a scion of the Astor dynasty, who managed the band Gorillaz and now produces films. They have a daughter, Mary, 16 and live in Hampstead in North London. Susie’s sixth novel, Love And Fame, was published this year.

Two girls by publican’s daughter

Bernardine Coverley was 16 when she met Freud in a bar in Soho in 1959. The daughter of Irish Catholic parents who ran a pub in Brixton, she attended boarding school from the age of four. When she was 15 her parents moved back to Ireland but she headed to London where she met Lucian. The artist first painted her aged 17 and pregnant with Bella, in 1961’s Pregnant Girl. He was 37 and had been married twice. They never lived together. At 60, she went to Mexico to work in an orchid nursery, an experience she turned into a book. She died aged 68, four days after Freud’s death.

Bernadine Coverley with Lucian Freud, who she met in a Soho bar in 1956 when she was 16 years old

1. The Fashionista

Bella Freud is owner of the eponymous fashion label and designer of the must-have ‘1970’ jumper — a block-coloured sweater emblazoned with the number 1970, beloved of Kate Moss and Alexa Chung. Her London shop sells expensive clothing — and a perfume called Psychoanalysis.

She saw little of her father until she was about 11. At 16, Bella left school and moved in with Rose Boyt, her half-sister, in London, and began sitting for her father.

Bella Freud is owner of the eponymous fashion label and designer of the must-have ‘1970’ jumper

‘I sat nude for two paintings, which was strangely unembarrassing. As soon as you’ve got your clothes off, you forget about them,’ she said. At the age of 21, Bella fell in love with Italian playboy Dado Ruspoli. He was 58. His hedonism inspired the seminal Sixties film La Dolce Vita. He was also an opium addict who introduced Bella to his habit. ‘It was lovely,’ she said. ‘Opium, for all its faults, was a lovely drug; very gentle.’

Back in London, she launched her fashion label and in 1993 met James Fox. He was the author of White Mischief, a novel about dissolute expats in Kenya’s Happy Valley which was made into a film starring Charles Dance. Bella and Fox married in 2001 and have a 16-year-old son. This week, the Mail’s Sebastian Shakespeare diary revealed she dumped Fox and is now dating 34-year-old artist toy-boy Taz Fustok, almost 40 years younger than her husband. Just the latest move in this very complicated, and Freudian, family saga.

2. The Novelist

Best-selling novelist Esther Freud, 54, is married to actor David Morrissey, 53, star of the BBC TV series The Missing, and famous for his portrayal of a youthful Gordon Brown in the TV drama The Deal.

Esther Freud, 54, is a best-selling novelist and is married to actor David Morrissey, with whom she has three children

They have three children aged 22, 19 and 13 and live in Highgate, North London. When aged four, her mother took her and her sister travelling.

Their adventures in Morocco were the basis for her novel Hideous Kinky, which was made into a film starring Kate Winslet. Her books include The Sea House, Mr Mac and Me, and the coming-of-age novel Love Falls.

A son by his posh muse  

Freud’s 1974 Hayward Gallery retrospective exhibition included full-frontal nude pictures of Lady Jacquetta Eliot. In all, she sat for Freud for nine years from 1969 to 1978, and featured in nine of his paintings.

Lady Jacquetta Eliot sat for Freud for nine years from 1969 to 1978, and featured in nine of his paintings

1. The Whirling Dervish

Growing up, Francis Eliot, 45, considered himself the son of Perry, the raffish 10th Earl of St Germans, although it was an open secret that he was the issue of Jacquetta’s long affair with Freud.

Francis Eliot was named after artist Francis Bacon. It was an open secret that he was Lucian Freud’s son

He was named after Freud’s fellow artist Francis Bacon, giving rise to a sardonic joke from Perry, who knew he was not the boy’s biological father: ‘How do you like your bacon ? Freud?’

Francis is married with two children and lives in an artistic community in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire. He is an expert whirling dervish, the eastern dance practised by Islamic mystics, and teaches dance in the 5 Rhythms method, combining movement and meditation.

Four by fashion student

Lucian met Katherine McAdam when she was a 19-year-old fashion student and he was married to his first wife, Kitty. They had four children (Jane, Lucy, Paul and David) — all born after Freud’s second, childless, marriage to Caroline Blackwood had collapsed.

Freud’s womanising drove McAdam to despair, and in 1966 she moved to a council flat. The children didn’t see their father again until they were adults. They were excluded from his will.

Lucian drove Katherine McAdam to despair with his womanising. The four children he had with her were excluded from his will

1. The Sculptor

Jane McAdam Freud, born in 1958, lives in Harrow, North West London, with an architect and two grown-up stepsons.

She was 31 when she reconnected with her father after winning a scholarship to the Rome Academy of Fine Art. He asked if she would teach him to sculpt.

Architect Jane McAdam Freud won a scholarship to the Rome Academy of Fine Art and shortly after reconnected with her father

Lucian helped fund a master’s degree at the Royal College of Art but they saw less of each other as he grew older. Jane was angry that their branch of the family was not acknowledged by him.

‘He always (wrote) to us on cards with his work on it. I keep them in a box. That’s all it is, though. A little box of bits. Half our parentage,’ Jane said.

2. Cruise ship artist who married a plumber

Lucy McAdam Freud is one of Lucian’s three children born in 1961. A gifted artist, she graduated from the Wimbledon School of Art. She is now an art instructor for Cunard cruises.

Lucy McAdam Freud is a gifted artist who graduated from the Wimbledon School or Art and is now an art instructer

She has two sons, Peter and James, by her ex-husband, a plumber she married when she was 22. Lucian was invited to the wedding but didn’t come.

When she visited him as he was ailing in 2011, she hadn’t seen him for 15 years. She said: ‘He stroked my cheek and cuddled me as if there had never been such a distance between us. He told me, “I’m a very selfish person”. Maybe it was a kind of apology on his part.’

3. The son who contested the will

Paul McAdam Freud, 58, an artist, re-established contact with his father in 1989 at a book launch. Lucian said that he wanted to paint Paul’s wife Kathryn (a doctor with whom Paul has three children). She did not sit for him.

‘I was a bit livid. Why would I want my father looking at my wife naked?’ said Paul, who lives in Southwark, South London.

Paul McAdam Freud is also an artist and re-established contact with his father at a 1989 book launch

But a relationship developed between father and son, with visits, postcards and phone calls.

In 2014, Paul lost a three-year battle over his father’s will. About £42 million, the bulk of the estate after tax, had been left to a secret trust run by a solicitor and his half-sister Rose Boyt.

Paul was told that he and his siblings would not get a share of the fortune and that the documents would remain secret.

Paul had first met his half-sister Rose — although he didn’t know their relationship at the time — at a club where they both worked when he was in his 20s.

‘I never knew I had a [half] sister,’ he said. ‘I was captivated. She was very attractive, and I was an active young man. She had a friend, and I remember thinking, Which one? — they were both attractive and friendly. I ended up seeing her friend. I learned about Rose a couple of years later.’

4. The magic mushroom enthusiast

David, at 53, the youngest of the McAdam Freuds, lives in East Sussex with a former Vogue fashion editor. He was artist-in-residence at Worthing Museum last year.

He also works for the charity A Band Of Brothers, which mentors young men who feel the lack of a father figure. David has four children by three different mothers and lost touch with one, Violet, when she was a baby.

David McAdam Freud lives with a former Vogue fashion editor and works for the charity Band of Brothers

When he was 24, he met his father in a bar but they never developed a relationship. He did, however, see him — and paint him — on his deathbed.

‘Lucian was so secretive and such a very strange character,’ he said.

David eventually met all ten of his acknowledged half-siblings, some for the first time, at their father’s funeral.

In September, David signed an online petition calling for the ‘re-legalisation of the supply and possession of Psilocybin or “magic” mushrooms’.