Picture pays Freud’s £500k death duties

LUCIAN Freud’s family have paid a £500,000 inheritance tax bill with a half-finished self-portrait.

Freud died in 2011, aged 88, leaving behind a huge haul of sketchbooks and drawings.

But his inheritors only recently found the self-portrait, and decided to use it in lieu of inheritance tax under a Government scheme designed to save great art works for the nation.

The scheme’s official adjudicator, overseen by Arts Council England, valued the oil-on-canvas painting at £559,773, massively denting the family tax bill.

The self-portrait – which lacks both a chin and much of the background – is believed to have been painted in the 1980s. It has been given to the National Portrait Gallery in London.