Lucian Freud’s London: An art, food and booze-filled guide
"Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait."
Impasto, impasto everywhere.
In the space of one month, we have Derek Jacobi playing Lucian Freud in James Lucas’ new film Moss & Freud (out in cinemas 29th May), which covers the making of his ‘Naked Portrait 2002’ of Kate Moss, and we have Ian McKellen as a fictional portrait painter named Julian Sklar in Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers (in cinemas from 14th May). Ed Solomon, screenwriter of the latter, has said the story was partly inspired by famous London painters Lucian Freud and his friend Francis Bacon.
The thing about Freud was: he was very much alive and kicking around London until 2011. He was famously private and didn’t like to be approached in the street; he was also a cliched Bad Dad of Art History to his many children. But in between his own childhood in St John’s Wood and his burial in Highgate Cemetery, he was a man about town.
You could seek out Freud’s various home and studio addresses across the decades at 20 Delamere Terrace, Paddington, or 138 Kensington Church Street, Fitzroy Square, Maida Vale and Holland Park. As most long-time Londoners have been, Freud was evicted with his artist pal John Craxton from 14 Abercorn Place, NW8, in the mid-1940s. Their downstairs neighbour, a music critic, complained to the landlord of the incessant noise from the young painters walking on the cracked glass of picture frames, inexplicably covering their floors. You can see the surrealist stuffed zebra head, which resided there, in The Painter’s Room (1944).
Later, in the 1960s, he lived in a series of council properties, including at Clarendon Crescent and Gloucester Terrace, Paddington, which were so dilapidated they were designated for demolition. Interior at Paddington, painted at Delamere Terrace, won him an Arts Council prize at the 1951 Festival of Britain.
More fun than simply staring at the un-unusual exteriors of houses across London, though, is an unofficial tour of Lucian Freud’s preferred pubs, galleries, gambling dens, restaurants and breakfast spots, from Soho to Kensington to the South Bank. Some are still standing and serving; some have become legends themselves.
The Wolseley, Piccadilly
The restauranteur Jeremy King gave Lucian Freud a protected corner table at The Wolseley, where the painter ate five or six nights a week in his final years. The two had met in the 1980s, when Freud began eating at Le Caprice, King’s now-closed St James joint, but they became friends properly after The Wolseley, with its art deco ‘grand European cafe’ interiors, opened in 2003. There’s a very charming recurring bit in Alan Rickman’s diaries in which the actor silently pleads “paint me” across the room, while eating there himself, without ever approaching Freud, who was often dining alone.
In extremely iconic behaviour, Freud kept his own wine stash in the restaurant’s cellars, and liked to order the Atlantic prawns or the moules et frites. He sometimes ate there with friends like David Hockney, Kate Moss and even Jeremy King himself, who also sat for Freud: a copper plate etching of King was sold by Sotheby’s in 2022. When Lucian died, the Wolseley’s staff placed a black tablecloth on his usual table with a single candle.
Clarke’s, Kensington
Opened in 1984 by chef Sally Clarke, this ‘farm-to-table’ restaurant is located at 124 Kensington Church Street, just down the road from Freud’s final home at 138. For fifteen years, the painter ate there almost everyday for breakfast with his studio assistant and model David Dawson: Earl Grey tea or a milky latte and hand-rolled pains aux raisins, Portuguese custard tarts, homemade nougat or scrambled eggs on toast, over a pile of newspapers. Sometimes he popped back for lunch too - to eat “whatever fish was on the menu” or perhaps a spot of game, you know - bringing people like Moss and performance artist Leigh Bowery in with him.
Clarke sat for Freud once or twice a week over a two year period around 2008, initially writing future menus in her head to pass the time before deciding to concentrate on the painting process. The garden room of her restaurant features a collection of his etchings, including Donegal Man (2007). In the main room, you can find work by artist Bridget Riley, another Kensington local who has lunched there, maps by Grayson Perry and a David Hockney portrait.
The French House, Dean Street, Soho
Lucian Freud first met Francis Bacon in 1944 and soon he was drinking in Bacon’s regular Dean Street haunts, including Soho institution The French House, one corner of a “lethal triangle” of pubs favoured by artists, writers and actors. There’s a great fictionalised version of wartime Soho nightlife with Freud, Bacon, John Minton and the rest of that set in Damian Barr’s The Two Roberts, one of our favourite novels of last year. Just to give a sense of shenanigans, in the preface to the second of William Feaver’s ‘The Lives of Lucian Freud’ biography volumes, Freud tells him (in 1973) that he used to go down to the bar of the Ritz and other war-time haunts “in a fez and postman’s trousers” during WWII.
Originally named York Minster, but known as the ‘French pub’ or ‘French house’, it’s now run by landlady Lesley Lewis, who has been in charge since the 1970s. Tom Baker drank there; Dylan Thomas left a copy of Under Milk Wood under a chair there; Irish writer Brendan Behan wrote some of his first play there; singer Suggs has been known to serve pints there. This is the kind of place that calls itself a watering hole and gets away with it. Send friends to the signature blue and white awnings of The French House and they won’t be mad about it.
The Coach & Horses, Greek Street, Soho
The second corner of Soho’s “lethal triangle” is a Grade II-listed 19th century pub, which has, in fact, been on the site for centuries with the current building dating back to 1840: it’s The Coach & Horses. On the corner of Greek Street and Romilly Street, drinkers at this establishment after Freud and Bacon’s 40s and 50s days include actor John Hurt and The Beatles. The staff of Private Eye magazine once had a tradition of fortnightly lunches here. It has even featured in a play by Keith Waterhouse, Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, about the hard-drinking Spectator columnist who was another regular at The Coach & Horses. I once experienced a bizarre, dream-like sing-a-long around a piano here, somewhere back in the mid 2010s. Magic.
The Colony Room Club/ Colony Room Green, Soho
OK, OK, the final corner of the “lethal triangle” is no longer with us. But the name and the spirit of The Colony Room may well live on in a new Soho bar within spitting distance, just across Regent Street. The original legendary club on Dean Street was founded by Muriel Belcher in 1948 and ran until 2008. Bacon walked in the day after it opened, was made a “founding member” and then got paid £10 a week to bring his artist friends in, including Lucian Freud. The list of members over the years is quite eye-popping: David Bowie, E.M. Forster, Isabella Blow, William Burroughs, Princess Margaret, Peter Blake and Henri Cartier-Bresson for fucks’ sake. This was back when members clubs were actually cool and not just wanky, bland places for rich people to eat.
In the 90s and 2000s, the YBA’s took it over - Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin - with Kate Moss and Sam Taylor-Wood occasionally stunt-serving drinks behind the bar. Writer Will Self wrote The Colony Room’s epitaph when it finally closed, a moment which some saw as marking the end of the true Soho. But wait! A new ‘Colony Room Green’ opened back in 2023, underneath Ziggy Green on Heddon Street. It’s open to all but with a view to trying to reimagine the old space with live jazz music and exhibitions featuring Cecil Beaton photographs. To quote one eccentric aristocrat in the BBC’s Pursuit of Love, “some of us must protect bohemia”.
National Gallery, Trafalgar Square
When Freud was cutting classes from the Central School of Art and Goldsmiths College as a student in the late 1930s, he’d go to study the Old Masters at the National Gallery directly, particularly the work of Hans Holbein and the Italian Renaissance paintings of Titian, now found in Room 6. The film Moss & Freud stays true to this art history, featuring Ellie Bamber, as Kate Moss, and Derek Jacobi, as Freud, standing in front of Titian’s Diana and Actaeon (1556-1559) in the gallery with Jacobi-as-Freud, perhaps sentimentally, saying: “Could you imagine anything more beautiful? I think a painting could be good.” The NG’s blockbuster exhibition this summer is 17th century Spanish painter Francisco de Zubarán.
Slade School of Fine Art, Bloomsbury
Freud taught painting at the Slade, part of University College London, in the 1950s alongside the painter and graphic artist Keith Vaughan. In 1958 he began an affair with one of his Slade pupils Suzy Boyt, the subject of 1959’s Woman Smiling, with whom he’d go on to have four children. Well, we say he taught painting but one of his most famous ‘students’ of that decade, Paula Rego, told visual artist Deanna Sirlin that she remembers it somewhat differently: “Lucian didn’t study at the Slade. He came in as a visiting lecturer. I think he was looking for girlfriends. He didn’t talk at all, he just looked. He said he taught by telepathy.” That said, Rego admired his work “very much”, especially “his precision” and recalled that her husband Victor Willing described Freud as “beautiful as a knife”. For anyone inspired, the Slade’s Summer School of short courses and classes currently includes Painting, Still Life, Life Drawing, Etching and an Introduction to Artists’ Pigments.
National Portrait Gallery
If you actually want to see a permanent collection of Lucian Freud paintings and drawings for yourself, head to the National Portrait Gallery. The NPG’s Primary Collection includes 28 of his works, including a 1963 self-portrait, a 1995 etching of his daughter, the fashion designer Bella Freud and a half-finished painting of Sally Clarke which he was working on when he died. They also have 69 portraits of him by other artists, including Bacon, Frank Auerbach, a pen and ink by Hockney, photographs by Lord Snowdon, Beaton and Cartier-Bresson and a bronze head by Jacob Epstein.
Room 26 of the gallery, on Floor 2, is dedicated to a rotating exhibition of pieces from the Lucian Freud Archive. This treasure trove is made up of 47 sketchbooks spanning from the 1930s to the 2000s, 150 childhood drawings, boxes of letters to and from Freud and his family and his artist’s palette, paints and etching tools. A recent Drawing Into Painting exhibition ran at the Portrait Gallery until May and is now touring to an art museum in Denmark.
The Hayward Gallery, South Bank
According to William Feaver’s biography, Freud’s first major mid-career retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in 1974 came about because the Arts Council needed a stopgap: another artist’s exhibition had fallen through. At the time he wasn’t as celebrated as friends like Bacon, though he would go on to be featured alongside other School of London artists in influential group exhibitions including ‘The Human Clay’ at the Hayward in 1976 and ‘The New Spirit in Painting’ at the Royal Academy in 1981. Another retrospective at the Hayward Gallery followed in 1988.
That’s not Freud’s only connection to the South Bank: much earlier in his career, his breakthrough painting, Interior at Paddington, was exhibited as part of the Festival of Britain in 1951, with the main purpose-built festival site right around where the Southbank Centre sits today. Coming up at the Hayward in 2026: the sculptures and paintings of Anish Kapoor (18th June to 18th October) and Kulpreet Singh’s film installations and abstract climate-focused paintings in Indelible Black Marks (16th June to 2nd August).
Tate Britain, Millbank
We’re not going to include every London gallery that has ever hung a Lucian Freud here but one retrospective that’s contemporary to the events in the Moss & Freud film is the big Tate Britain exhibition, which ran from June to September 2002, to mark the artist’s 80th birthday. Around the same time, a then 28-year-old Kate Moss posed nude for an almost life-size Freud painting, Naked Portrait 2002, over a period of nine months, while she was pregnant with her daughter Lila Grace. He also famously tattooed a flock of swallows into her thigh.
The Tate show featured over 140 paintings, etchings and drawings and was curated by his biographer, the art critic and painter William Feaver, with an afterword essay by Auerbach in the exhibition catalogue. Currently at Tate Britain, there’s British painter Hurvin Anderson’s first major solo show (until 28th August) alongside the American 19th/20th century artist James McNeill Whistler (until 27th September) and Chris Ofili’s Requiem for the victims of Grenfell in the gallery’s North Staircase.
Freud Museum, NW3
A quick word on London’s Freud Museum. It’s dedicated to the founding father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, who was Lucian’s paternal grandfather, and Sigmund’s daughter, psychoanalyst Anna Freud, Lucian’s aunt. It was their final home and Lucian visited the house as a child. In 2022-2023, the Freud Museum ran a retrospective titled ‘The Painter and His Family’ for Lucian’s centenary, curated by the art critic Martin Gayford, who sat for the painter between 2003 and 2005. He turned this unique experience into his book Man With a Blue Scarf: On Sitting For Lucian Freud, which includes their conversations on the work of Van Gogh and Titian.
The current exhibition running at the Freud Museum is Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal (until 10th August), which reveals another connection to Lucian. Gayford, talking with Freud’s longtime assistant David Dawson on a Frieze Masters podcast, recorded as part of the Freud Museum retrospective, noted that Freud and his onetime flatmate John Craxton were courted by the London Surrealists in the 1940s and invited to dinners at a Spanish restaurant on Charlotte Street, Fitzrovia. Freud is said to have found the movement too regimented and quoted “nothing is more surreal than two eyes and a noise”.
Lost To Time: Clubs, Casinos, Galleries & Seafood Spots
- Wheeler’s, Soho: This fish restaurant at 19-21 Old Compton Street was a favourite of Bacon’s for oysters and champagne. Freud met his gentleman racing bookie Victor Chandler at Wheeler’s: he painted him in Man in a String Chair (1988/ 1989). Earlier, in 1963, John Deakin took an excellent photograph of Freud, Bacon, Auerbach, Timothy Behrens and Michael Andrews eating and drinking there. The spot is now Cecconi’s Pizza Bar.
- Lefevre Gallery, Marlborough Fine Art & Hanover Gallery: Freud’s first solo show was in 1944 at Lefevre Gallery in Bruton Street, Mayfair [which closed in 2002]. Between the 1940s and 1970s, Freud also showed at galleries including the London Gallery (those Surrealists again), Marlborough Fine Art [which shut in 2024] and Anthony d’Offay near Bond Street [which closed up shop in 2001]. The Hanover Gallery on St George Street, Mayfair, closed in 1973 but still features on the National Portrait Gallery’s art walking tour of the neighbourhood.
- The Gargoyle Club, Soho: Another of Freud and Bacon’s Soho haunts in the 1950s and 1960s. It was a private members club on the upper floors of 69 Dean Street and, after the Colony Room, the drinkers would head to the Gargoyle for post-midnight drinks. The original decor included designs by Henri Matisse (with a fountain on the dance floor and yes, wooden hanging gargoyles) and famous members included: Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, Virginia Woolf, Fred Astaire, Lee Miller and Graham Greene. These days you’ll find Dean Street Townhouse in its place.
- Cafe de Paris, West End & Galicia, Notting Hill: Hannah Rothschild, the art-doc maker and former chair of the National Gallery, remembers that “you could be guaranteed that if you went out clubbing that Lucian would be there, I remember going to the Cafe de Paris [which closed in 2020]; he’d be there, you’d go to Greens, he’d be there; you’d go to that Spanish place down on Portobello, Galicia, really late at night. I don’t know when he slept…” Ed Sheeran now owns Notting Hill gastropub/tapas place Bertie Blossoms where Galicia once was.
- Taboo, Leicester Square: Taboo was performance artist (and friend of Freud’s) Leigh Bowery’s nightclub in the 1980s and 90s: the party was in the basement of Maximus club in Leicester Square. The club’s cashier, Sue Tilley, was the subject of a number of Freud’s paintings, including the famous Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, painted in the early 1990s: she also worked at the Charing Cross Job Centre. Taboo/Maximus is now a studio space for film and TV.
- Esmeralda’s Barn, Knightsbridge: Freud and Bacon would try their luck at this casino in Wilton Place, which was run by the Kray Twins in the early 1960s. The celebrity gangsters Ronnie and Reggie put on private sex shows and extorted regular gamblers who couldn’t pay their debts. The original mid-1950s interiors featured murals by Pietro Annigoni, Cy Grant was the resident singer and the basement was a lesbian bar named Cellar Club. Deadpan voice: Esmeralda’s Barn is now the five-star Berkeley Hotel.
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