Raven Smith Comes Face to Face with Lucian Freud

W hen I was younger—and impressionable in a way acutely specific to well-read nineteen-year-olds—I had so many ambitions for my then-unfurling future, scattered idylls of how an adult life could manifest. One of the top things on my not-altogether-unprecocious list was to be a great muse to a great painter. It seemed completely feasible to me that I could walk about London, minding my own business, and a man—it was always a man—would notice me, and ask to draw me.

Or maybe he’d already been drawing me from across the bar, a few furtive sketches that saw me, that captured my ineffable essence, my hidden depths. I would go to his studio and he would paint me, the silence while I tried to stay still in the poses throbbing with tension.

We would fall in love. We’d spend a fervent summer together—not sure how long you can feasibly date a painter, they tend to get a little in their heads no?—our two paths momentarily conjoining, captured in snapshots of canvas and natural light, of oral sex and oil smears, of cigarettes smoked countertop like a Vermeer painting, of long Millais baths. And so, to 1952’s John Minton by Lucian Freud, a painting that rekindled my muse wet dreams. To cut to the chase, Minton was the third side of a love triangle between Freud and fellow painter Adrian Ryan.

Minton was a teacher of traditional anatomical drawing—could he be any more Freudian?—and the three would meet up at Freud’s house in St John’s Wood. Note to self: spend more time in St John’s Wood looking beguiling. Allegedly Minton was more of an erotic visitor to the greater love affair of Freud and Ryan—Minton was the flying ant day to their balmy summer fling. Being gay was illegal at the time, which is both awful and frightfully romantic! A secret love! A forbidden love! The romance is beyond compare. A homoerotic triptych between two painters and a writer that began—sickeningly romantically—sometime during the war!? Now that’s an artistic crossroads.

To say the painting reveals itself slowly is a cliché that tracks. Like most good paintings, it’s ostensibly just a face, a passport photo in oils, the sitter ambivalent, the colours a muffled Pantone. Compared to the euphemistic and often brutal sensuality of Freud’s nudes, John Minton is positively restrained. There’s no obvious sense of titillating romance, of open yearning, of the notably erotic—yet I can’t help but infer the aching desire between the painter and the painted beyond the deadpan circumference of the piece.

The painting is delicious in its peripheral vision—offsite something is blooming, or about to bloom, or has perhaps bloomend and been cauterised, sitting in a vase as it slowly dies.

Not to be too Mona Lisa about it, but it’s hard to judge Minton’s mood in the piece. Freud is able to daub both emotional sharpness and emotional ambiguity. Is Minton wistful? Is he knowing? He’s pensive maybe, contemplating life itself? (five years after the sitting he takes his own life).

His demeanour is un-guessable. But such is the nature of the muse. A face that transcends easy-readings and hot takes. Minton is unknowable, fathomlessly fascinating. He’s a curio of the masculine form committed to canvas by one of the greatest painters to ever paint. The nineteen-year-old in me could not be more jealous.

Being British is such a spectacularly singular thing and being a Londoner is the pinnacle, the summit of a mountain of idiosyncratic and frankly bananas customs and we are so eccentric and so serious, we can never balance the two.

EXHIBITION

London: An Artistic Crossroads

25 May–5 July 2024 | London