Kate Moss and the £1million Lucian Freud tattoo
British artist Lucian Freud hated painting famous people, having refused to paint Princess Diana and the Pope in his lifetime. The fact they were used to being captured by paparazzi or in similar commissioned works made them off-putting to Freud, who was more preoccupied with conveying a sense of grit and reality with the fleshly forms and greying skin of his subjects. Instead, his nude realism works depicted civil servants with the kind of grandeur reserved for royalty, as he did most famously in Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995).
But it was supermodel Kate Moss who made him change his mind. Although Freud was always resistant to the “sheen of glamour” associated with celebrities, when Moss revealed one of her only unfulfilled career ambitions was posing for Freud, he was intrigued. Bella, Freud’s fashion designer daughter, who’d worked with Moss before, called her and said he’d be interested in meeting.
“He just wants to go for dinner with you,” Bella warned. “Don’t be late”. So, the unlikely duo of Moss and then 80-year-old Freud had dinner, and she wound up sitting nude for him that night. “[I] couldn’t say no to Lucian,” recalled Moss. “Very persuasive”. She called Bella the next day to ask how long the painting would take. Six months to a year was the reply.
In the end, it took nine, with Moss sitting for him seven nights a week, from 7pm to 2am. Freud was known to prefer painting in artificial light and was very stringent with the timing of his sessions. “I could not be one minute late,” Moss said. “He was really powerful. You wanted to please him.” The nude of a pregnant Moss was sold to an anonymous bidder at auction for £3.9million, and the friendship borne out of their extended time together left Moss with her own million-pound artwork.
During his stint in the Merchant Navy during the Second World War, Freud learned how to give homemade tattoos using a rudimentary scalpel and ink and told Moss his artistic touch meant he was often the one who wound up tattooing all the sailors. When she seemed enthusiastic about it, he offered to do the same for her.
When she said that she liked birds, he lit up: “I’ve done birds, I’ve got it in my book,” and proceeded to show her 1944’s mixed media Chicken in a Bucket. When that idea was swiftly turned down, he suggested he could tattoo a portrait of her. “I thought, ‘I’m not going to have a girl on my arse,’” recalled Moss. “So we decided to do a flock of birds.”
The two swallows that sit on her lower back are a permanent relic of their time together and likely worth almost as much as the portrait that came out of it, too. “I mean, it’s an original Freud,” Moss once said. “ I wonder how much a collector would pay for that? A few million?” The unlikely friendship they struck up is also set to feature in upcoming film, Moss and Freud. Should the budget go awry and Moss’ modelling career crumble, there’s always the fateful tattoo to fall back on.
“If it all goes horribly wrong, I could get a skin graft and sell it,” she once joked. “It’s probably the only [Freud tattoo] on skin that’s still around because when he was in the navy he was about 19. Can you imagine?”
