Queer Saint--The Cultured Life of Peter Watson by Adrian Clark

Author:Adrian Clark [Adrian Clark and Jeremy Dronfield]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784186289
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

When the Two Roberts first came down from Scotland in early 1941, they became part of the tiny, select group of Peter Watson’s fledgling protégés. There was one already under his care who was even younger than they were but showed great promise; he was the grandson of Sigmund Freud, and quite a teenage prodigy.

He had come to Peter’s attention through Stephen Spender. In 1939, Stephen and Inez – in the death throes of their marriage – were living in a house in Hampstead. The basement flat was occupied by the Austrian Jewish architect Ernst Freud and his family. Stephen got to know their rather eccentric sixteen-year-old son, Lucian, an intense youth whose mop of curly hair made him resemble Harpo Marx.15 Stephen quickly recognised the talent in the boy – ‘the most intelligent person I have met since I first knew Auden at Oxford’.16 Lucian was an enthusiastic but largely self-taught painter; he needed proper tuition, and in April 1939 Stephen arranged for him to attend the new art school at Dedham in Suffolk run by the painters Cedric Morris and his partner Arthur Lett-Haines.

Through Stephen, Lucian came to the attention of Peter Watson, who was equally impressed by the boy’s talent. In April 1940, the first published artwork by Lucian Freud – a self-portrait – appeared in Horizon; a simple and (pace the Morris school) untutored monochrome sketch, it was weirdly dysmorphic, skewed, quite unsettling, but also compelling. It would take an exceptionally perceptive eye to detect the potential in this quite crude drawing, but Peter Watson had that eye, and he saw what was in this boy.

By the end of 1940, Peter was giving Lucian his wholehearted support. In the autumn of that year, Ernst Freud, who had been unimpressed by the work his son was producing, had decreed that Lucian ought to give up painting and study for a proper profession; art was clearly not his vocation. Ernst would not go on paying for him to attend the Morris school; he regarded Morris’s style, which Lucian was emulating, as ‘revealing in a way which was almost improper’. Ernst wrote to Morris, ‘I could not help but loathe the last picture he brought to London.’17

When Peter heard about this, he stepped in immediately, and on 2 November – about the same time as he was arranging to bring the Two Roberts down to London – he wrote to Cedric Morris:

As there has been some question of Lucian’s father urging him to discontinue his painting and take some other job, I decided that I would pay his expenses for the time being, to enable him to carry on with his work. I am doing this because I am very fond of him and believe in him. It would be disastrous for him to reorientate his whole existence at this moment unless it were absolutely inevitable.

So perhaps you will send me an account for his expenses when convenient to you.18

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