'I had a very high tolerance for all his salacious stories'

Novelist Rose Boyt talks to Fiona Sturges about living in the shadow of her ‘genius’ father Lucian Freud – and how writing about their relationship has helped her to make peace with it

-  Fiona Sturges

The first time Rose Boyt was painted by her father, Lucian Freud, she was 18 years old. The portrait, titled Rose 1977-78, saw her reclining naked on a sofa, legs apart, with a hand resting on her forehead. Neither artist nor sitter spoke about the pose beforehand; that Boyt would be unclothed was assumed. “The one thing I asked was that he wouldn’t paint my hairy legs,” she recalls. “And I refused to take off my mascara.”

Boyt would sit for the painting three or four times a week, the pair of them working long into the night. “It was very arduous, very painful physically,” says Boyt. “Staying that still, you get to the point where you’re practically numb, almost like you’ve had an epidural.” Nonetheless, being painted was “just an ordinary thing that happened and my father entertained me so completely every session that I left the studio feeling elated. At the time, I was so disconnected from my feelings that I just went around being really thrilled at it all. I think I postponed feeling anything until later.”

Now Boyt, a photographer and author of novels including Sexual Intercourse and Hows Your Father [sic], is publishing a memoir in which she interrogates those “postponed” feelings. Naked Portrait is an emotionally complex examination of her relationship with her father, who died aged 88 in 2011, and the three occasions that she sat for him.