“... for the upper classes to mingle with louche artistic types – and, of course, vice versa. She met Lucian Freud at a party given by Lady Rothermere. He was the beautiful untidy young man standing at the back next to Francis Bacon and booing loudly while everyone else clapped Princess Margaret’s execrable rendering of a Cole Porter medley. Here, nicely ...”

“... unique and contingent. And yet surely that’s also the drive behind the finest paintings by Lucian Freud. More frequently, the camera’s capacity to collect evidence disrupts whatever is painting-like about the image. Photos by Tina Barney, a portraitist of contemporary aristocracy, share space with Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews. For all the ...”

“... use of what is intimate and close-by as subject matter has contemporary resonances (Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud) and historical ones (from Chardin’s studio-bound way of working to Cézanne’s Provençal landscape beat, and the dusty, unchanging workspaces of Giacometti and Morandi). The dedication of life to work suggests that art is a long and difficult ...”

“... Bacon will have found that he went unmentioned (not a neo-romantic) and that the reproduction of Lucian Freud’s 1952 portrait of a luminously doleful John Minton made page 74 the one page worth saving. For Bacon, seeing it in 1973, 16 years after Minton’s suicide, this was a painting wreathed in despair. To him John Minton had been the epitome of the ...”

“... The Forest at Pontaubert. His preferences trace a line through English art from Gainsborough to Lucian Freud, making a rather pointed detour round the Pre-Raphaelites but spending arguably too long in what he himself called the ‘virtuous fog’ of Bloomsbury, represented here by an Omega dinner service intended to celebrate famous women, badly painted in ...”

“... scale. How much better about ourselves it makes us feel that our greatest living artist, now that Lucian Freud is dead, is back from California to celebrate an undervisited corner of agricultural East Yorkshire and make it glorious. The exhibition is full of signs of proud Englishness, and of spring and summer; it thumbs its nose at austerity and ...”

“... coming election by closing in on their faces. They are Cardinals Bellini (Stanley Tucci), Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati) and Tremblay (John Lithgow), respectively American, Nigerian and Canadian. The other favourite, Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), an Italian cardinal who is less discreet and more stagey, has a scene to himself. He is the film’s conservative. He ...”

“... detail and, like Wilkie, turned to the profitable business of portraiture. In our time Lucian Freud found the shift from little brushes to big ones a relief. In Wilkie’s case the sheer effort and time which went into one detailed painting may have told, but a look at his early work invites other thoughts. First, just as the late pictures show him ...”

“... painter, he is.There are some early photographs in the catalogue of Andrews with Soho friends like Lucian Freud and Tim Behrens (whose portrait is in the exhibition). Andrews was excited by parties: he looks at once charming and shy. Other painters of his generation impressed their personalities on their time by finding identifiable ways of making ...”

“... her own. When you think about what kind of artist she was, putting her child-invaded studio and Lucian Freud’s naked-friend-and-acquaintance-laden chairs and couches side by side suggests a common attitude to work that has nothing to do with style and not much to do with subject. (Eardley did paint one male nude: it shows a friend, Angus Neil, lying on a ...”

“... do it. Photography has so far subdued the power of painting to embellish personality that when Lucian Freud (who in his prices, subjects and reputation is the closest thing we have to a dominant face-painter of Reynolds’s calibre) paints the Queen (as Reynolds painted the Prince of Wales) or Kate Moss undressed (as Reynolds painted Kitty Fisher), it is ...”

“... Jan van Eyck (The Complete Paintings of the Van Eycks, 1968). Hughes greatly admires, for example, Lucian Freud, who stands prominently on his post-war shortlist of two dozen or so artists. One could forgive the reader of Culture of Complaint for thinking that a remark such as ‘so haunting an erotic tenderness’ (apropos of Girl With Roses, in ...”

“... with his flesh squeezed to resemble cleavage and a spiky merkin to hide his tucked genitals. Lucian Freud’s nude paintings of him captured an unaccustomed vulnerability, but Bowery pursued more aggressive styles in public. In a murky video at Tate Modern, a mistimed onstage enema sprays an early-1990s audience. The singer and drag artist Alan Pillay ...”

“... as C. Eliot Hodgkin’s pictures of plants on London bomb sites, there is a little picture here by Lucian Freud of buddleia, a major coloniser of abandoned buildings and waste ground and the plant most often to be seen in his big pictures of house-backs and overgrown junk seen from a high window.After overgrown gardens the geometry of well-tended rows is the ...”

“... of 1509, seems to us more ‘naked’, and more modern – akin to the work of Schiele or Lucian Freud – than his engraving of a perfectly proportioned Apollonian Adam. The previous iteration of The Renaissance Nude in Los Angeles included a fine example of a late 15th-century Florentine drawing of studio lads in their underwear. It is natural to ...”