Rose Boyt was 18 when she sat for her father Lucian Freud. Although “sat” is too decorous a word for this full-frontal sprawl. “Nothing had been discussed,” Boyt, a novelist, writes in the coolly explosive first line of her memoir, Naked Portrait. “I just assumed I would be naked.” She continues in the same spare, explicit style. “I got undressed and asked him what he would like me to do. He said it was up to me.
I lay down on the sofa and shielded my eyes, the big ceiling lights in the studio working on full power. I lay down, but I didn’t want to look obedient in my portrait, I didn’t feel obedient. I wanted my father to paint me but not like the others — there was some kind of battle going on, unacknowledged but expressed in the muscles of my bent leg — I was alert, prepared to spring up at any moment. I asked him not to paint in my hairy legs. He said it was not like that. We talked about make-up. He didn’t like to paint it, but I was not going to take off my mascara. In the end he decided it was part of me. That was a small victory.”
