Lucian Freud’s Ria, Naked Portrait — a late masterpiece by the painter who said, ‘Being naked has to do with making a more complete portrait’

In the spring of 2006, the art handler Ria Kirby was in the midst of installing a very special exhibition. Held at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, her place of work, it featured new paintings by the contemporary masters Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, alongside works by the two titans of British 19th-century art, John Constable and J.M.W. Turner.

One morning, Freud came to inspect the hang, and Kirby — an aspiring painter, who had recently studied at Camberwell College of Arts — couldn’t resist the urge to say how much she admired him. The artist’s response was to ask her to pose for one of his paintings, and within 48 hours Kirby was at Freud’s studio on Kensington Church Street drinking a cup of tea.

Freud was 83 at the time, which makes what followed all the more impressive — some 2,400 hours’ worth of sittings, with Kirby posing for him on all but four evenings over a 16-month period. The culminating painting, Ria, Naked Portrait, one of the artist’s late masterpieces, is now coming to auction for the first time. It is being offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 9 October 2024.

Ria can be seen lying naked on her side — on a wrought-iron bed made with quilted cream sheets that crumple and crease. A pristine white pillow cushions her face, which, like her curly golden locks, is built up in the impasto technique characteristic of Freud’s mature style. The artist asserted that he ‘wanted paint to work as flesh does’.

Kirby’s flushed skin is captured in an intricate mix of hues: from the warm, pink blushes of her hands and feet, to the bluish shadows of her forearms and thighs, and the touches of pale Naples yellow over her stomach and hips. The use of Cremnitz white, a favourite paint of Freud’s for rendering human skin, is also evident.

Kirby has said she chose her own pose — namely, ‘the position I sleep in’. However, the reclining female nude also occupies an important place in art-historical tradition. There are examples by the likes of Giorgione, Titian, Manet and Velázquez — the Spaniard’s Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery in London counting among Freud’s favourite paintings.

‘Being naked has to do with making a more complete portrait,’ Freud said. ‘When someone is naked, there is… nothing to be hidden.’

Accounts of posing for the artist varied considerably from sitter to sitter. One subject, the picture framer Louise Liddell, said that sessions were so intense it was ‘like sticking your finger in an electric socket and being wired up to the national grid’. Much of the success of Freud’s portraits is undoubtedly due to the chemistry that existed between him and each sitter.

Kirby spoke of her experience positively. ‘In the first few months, the hardest part of sitting was trying to stop laughing,’ she said after the picture’s completion. Freud had a seemingly endless supply of ‘tales and songs and anecdotes’.

Posing soon ‘became second nature’ for Kirby. ‘I found it quite a release,’ she said. ‘It was one place… where I didn’t have anyone phoning me or hassling me. All I had to do was lie still.’

In the picture, Kirby relaxes and sinks into a comfortable position on the mattress, her legs bending and wrapping around themselves. Her right hand gently presses into a sunken fold, while her left hand props up the pillow beneath her head. Such is her easy state of repose that it’s almost as if her body and the bed have become one.

Freud also enjoyed the sittings, describing Kirby as ‘good in every way’. He admired the fact that she was both punctual and committed. Not only did she dash straight to his studio every evening after a day’s work at the V&A (and visit at weekends too), she also cancelled a holiday to Greece early in the pair’s artistic relationship, so as not to stall the portrait’s progress.

A typical evening would include dinner at one of Freud’s two favourite restaurants: The Wolseley in Mayfair or Clarke’s in Kensington. (So well-liked was Freud at the former that, at 9pm on the day his death was announced in 2011, waiters placed a black tablecloth and single lit candle on the table he had always sat at.)

‘I’d plough through three courses with wine and pudding,’ Kirby said. The artist, by contrast, ‘hardly ate because he was working’. After Freud had paid for dinner, the pair would return to the studio. He also paid for Kirby’s taxi home at the end of the night.

Photographs taken by Freud’s assistant, David Dawson, show that much of the painting was finished by the autumn of 2006. However, sittings continued well into the following year — which is in keeping with the painstaking process of the artist in his mature phase.

Ria, Naked Portrait dates from a period of remarkable ambition late in Freud’s career. Energised by the commercial and reputational success of his partnership with New York art dealer William Acquavella in the early 1990s, he began producing canvases of monumental size. Well-known examples include his portraits of the performance artist Leigh Bowery and the benefits supervisor Sue Tilley. The painting coming to auction is no exception, measuring more than five feet across.

Notwithstanding their size, Freud’s late pictures tend to be painted in his trademark granular texture. In Ria, Naked Portrait, Kirby’s skin pulsates with life, and the surface of the painting is not unlike a landscape: buttery-smooth in some areas, coarse and calcified in others.

The picture was bought by the present owners from Acquavella Galleries in 2008. It then featured in Lucian Freud Portraits, a landmark exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery in 2012.

That show was five years in the making, with the artist heavily involved in the choice of works and the layout, even though he died a few months before it opened. As testament to the significance of Ria, Naked Portrait to him, this painting hung in the final room — completely alone.

The 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale is on view at Christie’s in London, 3-9 October 2024. Explore Christie’s 20th/21st Century autumn sale season in London and Paris, 1-22 October