My father Freud’s portrait of mother and me
Painting that shines light on little-known period of artist’s life with teenage runaway is to be auctioned
IT IS one of Lucian Freud’s most tender paintings, depicting his teenage lover pregnant with his unborn child.
For his daughter, Bella Freud, the portrait of Bernadine Coverley is even more poignant, capturing the moment her mother was cherished by “the love of her life” for all the world to see.
The painting, Pregnant Girl, one of Freud’s most famous from the period, is to be sold at auction for the first time, and is predicted to fetch up to £10 million at Sotheby’s, more than half a century after it was created.
With it come more details of a littleknown moment in the artist’s life, after he fell in love in his late thirties with a former convent schoolgirl and teenage runaway who would end up as mother to two of his children.
Bernadine Coverley went on to move with her daughters, Bella and Esther, to Morocco, her later life captured for posterity by Kate Winslet in the film Hideous Kinky.
Little has been known about the true nature of her relationship with Freud, described now by Bella as “a very happy time” in her mother’s life.
While Freud was well known for leaving women in his wake, he and Coverley remained friends for life. She died from cancer just four days after him in 2011.
Bella Freud, now 54 and an international fashion designer and with a son, said her mother had been proud of the portrait.
“I like that my mother was so clearly in my father’s thoughts and gaze, that at this time she was really important to him,” she said.
“She didn’t talk about the painting but she was proud of it – I could tell by the tone of her voice when she first told me that it was of her pregnant with me in that picture.
“It must have been a very happy time in her life, being pregnant with the man she loved, and him wanting her to be there and paint her. I like thinking of her feeling cherished: there wasn’t a lot of that in her childhood.” Coverley had been sent to a convent boarding school aged four, and tried to run away twice. She was 17 when Freud painted her, reclining on a green sofa in his west London studio.
When asked about her parents’ relationship, Bella Freud added: “My mother was very young, about 15 or 16, when they met. “She used to go to Soho with a friend and she met my father in one of the bars or pubs, probably the French pub.
“I don’t remember them together when I was little, but when I was 11 and we lived in Sussex, my father used to visit occasionally and they got on really well. It was great seeing them like that, and my mother clearly finding him very amusing and interesting still.
“I believe they got on incredibly well at first, my father was really keen on my mother but he still had relationships with other women.
“I think he was undoubtedly the love of her life even though she did things that he disapproved of, like taking us to live in Morocco.”
Pregnant Girl, created in 1960-61, passed from Freud to his Marlborough Gallery in the Sixties, where it was sold to a private collector. Its current owners acquired it in 1983.
It is described by Sotheby’s as “a defining work in Freud’s oeuvre”. Experts estimate it will go for between £7 million and £10 million in the sale on Feb 10, proclaiming: “There is arguably no other portrait by Freud that is more gripping, more tender and more laden with such emotional depth.”
Oliver Barker, Sotheby’s deputy chairman in Europe, said: “This astonishingly beautiful painting embodies the profound bond between Lucian and Bernadine that lasted a lifetime.”
Mr Barker said it was “very rare” for such an important portrait by Freud to emerge for sale, adding that he believed it would have “universal appeal” to buyers around the world.
Shortly after this painting, Freud also captured Bella as a newborn, in
Baby on a Green Sofa.
‘My mother was proud of it – I could tell by her voice when she first told me it was of her pregnant with me’