An intimate portrait by Lucian Freud of one of his children that has not been seen in public for more than 20 years is expected to fetch up to £20m when it is auctioned next week.
Ib Reading was the result of more than 70 sittings by Isobel Boyt in the artist’s studio in Holland Park, west London, in 1997. Known to her family as Ib, Boyt is painted while reading Marcel Proust’s 4,000-page novel Remembrance of Things Past, wearing a loose dress, with her bare feet up on a chair and the book in her lap.
In the background of the portrait is an oak chest with tarnished brass handles in which Freud kept letters, telegrams and photographs from as early as the 1940s.
Freud never dictated the pose of his sitters, Boyt said. “My father would often make suggestions but he never said, ‘I want you wearing this and sitting there’. He made everything feel easy and the choice was endlessly yours.
“He wanted to paint people as they were, he didn’t want to mould them or persuade them to do one thing or another. He had chosen to paint us, and part of who we were was how we chose to sit.
“I did not wish to be portrayed reading, I wished to read. It was something I normally wouldn’t have time to do with three young children. It was an opportunity.”
She sat three times a fortnight for more than a year. “It was the minimum he could consider, and the maximum I could. It worked well,” she said.
“It was uninterrupted time with him. What he really wanted to do was paint, which is what he did. Sitting was a means to spending time with him – to connect with him, to develop your relationship with him.”
Boyt and her father had “interesting and animated conversations” about “Proust’s treatment of obsessive love and tortuous jealousy, unrelenting in intensity and duration”.
Freud, said Boyt, was “very well read. Any turn of phrase, sentence or even paragraph he was impressed by, he would often learn and recite. He had an incredible memory and loved literature.
“I didn’t withdraw into my own world when reading. We had lots to talk about, him relating things to his own experiences or observations informed by other literature. It was never boring.”
The portrait has been in a private collection since it was acquired soon after Freud completed it. It was last seen publicly in an exhibition in New York in 2000 and has never before been on show in the UK. It is on display at Sotheby’s in London before the auction house’s sale of modern and contemporary works on 1 March.
The painting is one of five portraits of Boyt by Freud, including one when she was seven years old. In Ib Reading, she is in her mid-30s.
“Freud was very close to Ib, and painted her five times over the course of his career. This is the last portrait, and it is poignant and soothing,” said James Sevier, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art.
“Painting his children allowed Freud to build a closeness with them. He only painted those he was closest to, and there’s an intimacy and trust between painter and sitter.”
Freud first met Boyt’s mother, Suzy Boyt, at the Slade School of Fine Art during the 1950s, where she was a talented student and he was a part-time teacher. The couple had four children together, Alexander, Rose, Isobel and Susie, all of whom would become the subject of many of Freud’s greatest works. Freud had 14 children in total.
The painting is “at once tender and transfixing, delicate and profoundly evocative”, said Emma Baker, a director at Sotheby’s. “In Ib Reading, we bear witness both to Freud’s meticulous skill as a painter and an intensely private moment between a father and his daughter.”
