Picador snaps up ‘brave’ memoir of Lucian Freud by his daughter, Boyt

Picador has snapped up Naked Portrait: A Memoir of Lucian Freud by the artist’s daughter, Rose Boyt. 

Publishing director Georgina Morley acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, including audio and serial, from Matthew Hamilton at the Hamilton Agency. The book will be published in spring 2024. 

Naked Portrait explores Boyt’s experience of sitting for her father’s paintings from childhood until her marriage and the “power imbalance in their relationship”. After Freud died Boyt discovered her old diary from the years 1989 to 1990, mainly about sitting for her father’s paintings. The publisher continued: “She was shocked by the content of the diary, having completely erased from her mind how unmanageable he had been on occasion, his anecdotes way more kinky and lurid than she remembered, and delivered with no regard for her tender feelings.”

Morley commented: “Rose’s memoir is candid, brave and absolutely beautifully written. I cannot say how much I admire her clear-eyed examination of her relationship with her beloved father, from sitting for him as a teenager, naked, to her realising that the world in which he – and therefore she – moved was not as safe as perhaps it should have been. It’s an extraordinary portrait of what it is like to be the child of a great artist and to grow up in the sort of familial chaos most of us are blessed never to have experienced. I cannot wait to share Rose’s work with readers.”

Boyt added: “What struck me when I read the diary was not the events I had clean forgotten – nobody wants to remember everything – but the very familiar thoughts and feelings that had not found their way into the manuscript, those ineradicable moments of confusion and shame and anxiety that at the time I had chosen not to bring to my own consciousness by writing them down. I find my voice in a retrospective narrative that frames extracts from the diary, trying to make sense of everything in real time as I look back, a tumultuous journey of discovery that is tough but ultimately brings peace.”