Free of Lucian Freud — Celia Paul’s road to fulfilment

I was looking the other day at a video of the artist Celia Paul in conversation with the curator of her recent exhibition at the Huntington Library in California. The image projected there of a reserved and quietly-spoken woman, hesitant, diffident and patently ill at ease in the spotlight, left me very unprepared for the raw honesty and openness of this memoir.

Two early stories give an idea of what lies ahead. The first is of her five-year-old self, the youngest so far in a family of four daughters of a missionary father in India, making herself seriously ill with jealousy on the arrival of a fifth sister. She resolved, she says, to die, and is still convinced that by an act of will she brought on leukaemia, resulting in the removal of the entire family from India so that she could be treated at Hammersmith Hospital.

Some eight years later, her father now head of a religious community in Devon, Paul was at boarding school nearby.