Freud’s artist daughter left out of father’s will dies at 64
OF THE 14 children Lucian Freud acknowledged as his, none inherited more of his extravagant artistic talent than sculptress Jane McAdam Freud, eldest of his four offspring by convent-educated Katherine McAdam, who’d caught his eye as a young fashion student in London.
But I am sorry to record that that talent, which earned Jane numerous awards, has been cruelly extinguished by her premature death on Tuesday — just 11 years after that of her father. ‘Jane was only 64,’ Lucy, her younger sister, notes, before offering a glimpse into the extraordinary circumstances in which she and Jane and their brothers, Paul and David, grew up.
Their mother was almost broken by Freud’s brazen infidelity, which, in 1961, saw him father three children by different women. Katherine herself gave birth to Lucy; publican’s daughter Bernardine Coverley had Bella — acclaimed fashion designer Bella Freud — while Freud’s longstanding mistress and muse, Suzy Boyt, had Isobel, the third of the four children she would bear him.
Recalling that Jane was eight when their mother left Freud, Lucy says it was this event which made her sister ‘even more determined to succeed’. She did so, adds Lucy, ‘without any financial support’.
Unlike other women who bore him children, the girls’ mother refused to ask Freud for anything. Katherine didn’t even tell him that she was leaving, still less say where she and the children were heading — a tower block on a London council estate.
Jane and Lucy and their brothers never saw their father again as children. Freud expressed no regret. Asked to comment on fathering children by different women at the same time, he replied: ‘Don’t you realise I had a bicycle?’
The brutal flippancy seemed to intensify Freud’s attractiveness to women, including Jacquetta Eliot — wife of Perry St Eliot, later the Earl of St Germans — with whom he had a son, Francis. Art student Celia Paul gave birth to Freud’s last acknowledged child, Frank, in 1984, 36 years after the birth of Annie, the first of his two children by Kitty Garman, one of only two women whom he married. The other was Lady Caroline Blackwood, who, unusually, bore him no children.
Jane put all this behind her, winning scholarships and, in adulthood, the European Trebbia Award for artistic achievement. Most remarkably of all, she bonded with her father, teaching him how to make lithographs and, in his final months, spending hours sketching him for a sculpture made after his death.
Yet she and her siblings — unlike their half-brothers and sisters — were left unmentioned in his £42 million will.