Unveiling of Lucian Freud’s ‘Skewbald Mare, 2004’ - Chatsworth 30 June 2004

Mr Robert Hughes
Your Graces, ladies and gentlemen, first of all I would like to say how thrilled I am to be visiting Chatsworth which is alas something I’ve not done before and under such auspicious circumstances as your guest. I find it such a pleasure as Lucian has been a friend for years and I wrote a little book on him, not the last word on him by any means but a reasonable introduction to his work, to which however at the time this wonderful painting did not belong. I was just knocked out when I saw it for the first time in the Wallace Collection a few weeks ago, because clearly it seems to be one of Lucian’s absolute best paintings, and one of the best painting by an artist that I fervently and sometimes abjectly admire.

Australians should not indulge in family reminiscences in houses like this, however, I do recall when I was kid reading a book called The English Eccentrics by Edith Sitwell in my father’s library. What the story was I really forget, but there was a character, one that was a type totally strange to me, known as a Hunting Parson, who would, when the spirit moved him, deliver sermons from the back of a horse. Little did I expect that I would be delivering a sermon on the backside of a horse.

As those of us who know him and many that don’t will know, Lucian is no stranger to the gee gees or the track. I think he loves horses without ever having owned one; it would be difficult to keep one in that studio. He did however visit and frequent a riding school in London. Where exactly the school is I am afraid I cannot tell you but that is where the mare was stabled. He would go back and look at it and draw it I suppose although I have not seen the preliminary stuff, and he was just enamoured, not only with the mare’s sweetness, character and personality, but also by its remarkable markings. Also he said it was clearly in love with its own body. It so loved being petted and stroked and being made much of, that he felt some desire to make something of this in his own excited fondness.

He is a great and extremely discriminating “dobbler”. He has never made the mistake of so many people when dealing with animals, of trying to make them look human. He has always perceived the extraordinary strangeness of whippets and greyhounds and he may have painted a cat once but I don’t think so. The pet fallacies of thinking they are really just like us has never struck Lucian. He doesn’t go for the glossy aristocratic beauty of the animals of the 18th century horse painter - you could never confuse his feelings about horses with those of Stubbs.

What is extraordinary in this picture is the shaggy strength and its complete unlikeness to ourselves. How he did this one, I assume it must have been painted largely from memory, because he doesn’t paint at the stable, whereas a human sitter has to endure that pergatorial inquisition that goes on session after session after session, as some of you in this room doubtless know. A good deal is made up from memory, which I think has given him some of the liberties of texture, not so much of colour, but more excited stroking, hacking and the vigour of the painting. His portraits are not primarily about human personalities. What he is really good at is in recording the very, very unsparing detail of human physiology which doesn’t really presume that the personality shows through the physical facts of the face.

It’s like that Shakespeare quote “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face; He was a gentleman on whom I built an absolute trust”.

The idea that he can say something about the animals’ personality by painting it strikes me as extremely dubious. It is very attractive to think about when you are looking at say a Landseer, and the basis of the immense popularity of people like Alfred Munnings but that’s not actually what Lucian’s work depends upon. What he sets out to do and loves doing is giving a terrific amount of unsparing rendering of the human flesh, all the modules and molecules, so he gives you the hair of the horse, the underlying muscular structure and ripples in the skin and above all in this case, the general feeling of strangeness that goes with it. All of you have probably been to a stable at one time or another, I know I have and I don’t ride, and the illusion of something astonishing and dreamlike about the sight of these great beasts that have such a powerful association in history concerning power, to see them appearing in the gloom of the stable and there is something of that in this horse’s backside.

As you will have divined, I am a great enthusiast of this man. I like him partly because he is kind of difficult to categorise. Yes he is a realist, deeply preoccupied with the physical fact in front of him, the stuff that he has set himself to record. And yet there is always this permanent strangeness in Lucian’s gaze on the model or his subject which makes it hard for us to characterise as indeed it should be. Lucian is one of these painters who sees the world as being essentially rather a strange place, rather a little distant from us, and the act is of making art about this strange world in which you find yourself. In particular with Lucian’s images of the non-human world, in particular with this painting here which I think is a masterpiece, and I think this exactly because of those qualities. That kind of reaching towards something that is not quite obtainable even if the unobtainable is a horse’s “arse”. I am filled with admiration for the man who did it and I must say I am filled with jealousy for those who possess it.

Thank you very much indeed.