In 2007, shortly after London learned it would host the Olympics, Lucian Freud was told he would be the National Portrait Gallery’s “Olympiad” in 2012 - a notion he found “rather amusing”, says Sarah Howgate, Contemporary Curator at the National Portrait Gallery.
They then embarked on the process of selecting 132 works from a career spanning seven decades, working together right up until Freud’s death last year. The result is Lucian Freud Portraits, the show that opened this week to emphatic reviews.
“It was difficult because as Lucian said, ‘all my paintings are portraits.’” Howgate explains.
"So we could have included dogs and horses and chairs and everything ever, but we decided to keep quite purist about it, and focus on his head and naked portraits and his figure paintings.
"If we extended beyond that it would have been an exhibition twice the size.”
Step one was to pick out the must-haves from Freud’s famous faces. ‘Big Sue’ the sleeping benefits supervisor, the Leigh Bowery naked canvases, the portraits of his mother and the early, wide-eyed close-framed heads were all immediate choices.
Over the coming years Howgate would visit Freud and his assistant David Dawson at Sally Clarke’s restaurant, where the artist would breakfast and lunch daily.
“I would let him know where we had got to with the selection,” she tells me.
“We really planned the exhibition carefully, so I was able to show him how I intended to hang each room. That hasn’t changed radically from the final exhibition.
“I remember at one point Lucian saying, 'Oh, it looks rather good, I must come and see it' which was quite funny.”
However, as we know, this was an ambition Freud would never achieve but Howgate insists his death didn’t alter the motivation behind the show.
“We’ve always tried to show that this isn’t a memorial exhibition, but a celebration of his work and it was conceived when he was very much alive. He would have been incredibly moved to see this body of work.”
One of the reasons for this is that Freud’s portraits are more than just paintings of people. He was an artist as famous for his relationships with his sitters as much as his depictions of them.
“That’s what fascinated him and that’s what he recorded in the painting - a lifetime of a relationship.
“And because he took so much time over his paintings, that really was a way of getting to know someone. He didn’t mix paint before his sitters arrived, he’d do that once they were there.
“They didn’t have to sit in silence, they could talk. But at the same time he did demand that his sitters had that ‘inner life’ that kept them occupied while he was painting.”
One of these relationships, with his assistant and close friend David Dawson, comprises the exhibition’s grand finale. The Portrait of the Hound was the last painting Freud worked on before he died, and as a result, is now one of the show’s biggest draws. Unfinished, it was a work always intended for the exhibition.
“Nothing was changed following Lucian’s death, apart from the tense in the essays in the catalogue,” Howgate explains.
“He started The Portrait of the Hound four years ago, and he wanted to include it in the space we set aside when we made the very initial selection in 2007.
“It’s very fitting that it is of David, who has been his closest friend, companion and assistant for the last 20 years. It’s a really affectionate painting of that relationship. I find it very moving.”
Shortly before we speak, David Hockney has come to visit the show. Howgate says he too had an opinion on The Portrait of the Hound.
“When he saw it now, he said he thought it was finished, that obviously Freud would have carried on painting it, but that all the elements are there.”
Hockney would know, not only as an artist himself, but as a previous sitter for Freud. Indeed, his own portrait - an understated, closely cropped head shot - hangs around the corner from The Hound.
It’s one, when pushed, that Howgate will admit to being among her favourites.
“I like the painting of David Hockney very much because David is a friend and I was aware of that painting being painted and that experience. Like the painting of Frank Auerbach, a painting of an artist by another artist has got such power.”