A Painter's Progress: A Portrait Of Lucian Freud

"David Dawson, Lucian Freud’s devoted assistant, friend and frequent model for the last 20 years and an artist in his own right, has produced a beautiful tome filled with spellbinding, intimate photographs of the artist, many at work in his squalid, paint-encrusted studio. Particularly fascinating are the portraits juxtaposing Freud’s subjects with his paintings of them, eloquently revealing how they were transformed by his art. We see David Hockney sitting, hands folded, beside his fleshier close-up on the easel, while whippet-thin Freud, in characteristic knotted scarf and untied boots, is caught frozen in the doorway clutching a fistful of brushes, as if at the scene of a crime. Fans of this intense painter — who died in 2011 after a lifetime of stripping his sitters bare, often in every sense — won’t want to miss this."