Why Lucian Freud hated having his picture taken

One of Lucian Freud’s firmly fixed views about himself was ‘I’m not at all introspective’. This was, like many opinions we hold about ourselves, both true and not true. Perhaps it was more that he did not want to look within: his gaze was directed outwards. Lucian had trained himself to see everything — animate and inanimate — without preconceptions (one of his anxieties was that his own feelings would leak into a picture and spoil it). But looking at oneself and at another person are processes that are fundamentally dissimilar, both practically and psychologically. This puts his self-portraits, which are on show in an exhibition at the Royal Academy next week, in a separate category to the rest of his work.

Lucian disliked being the focus of attention — even refusing to turn up to his own private views — and hated having his picture snapped by strangers. One day in the mid-1990s I was having lunch with him at St John restaurant, when he suddenly stood up and started hurling bread rolls at another customer.