When Lucian Freud met Kate Moss turns out to be the encounter of a sweet, cuddly old gentleman and a guardedly opaque hedonist. Both look defanged.
Freud’s sensational Naked Portrait 2002 is a nude study of the supermodel, to whom he had been introduced by his daughter, the fashion designer Bella Freud. Moss was pregnant when she sat for him – which lent a fierce, additional frisson to the painting’s candour and intimacy. Ellie Bamber plays Kate and carries off the unclothed moments with great directness and aplomb. Freud is played with Germanic R sounds by Derek Jacobi (who incidentally played Freud’s contemporary Francis Bacon in John Maybury’s Love Is the Devil in 1998) and he has Freud’s buzzard-like look but not quite the sharpness and severity.
