Still life: sitting for Lucian Freud

As a new exhibition of early work by Lucian Freud opens in London, its curator David Dawson - Freud's long-time assistant and model - explores the relationship between the great artist and his sitters

In pictures: Highlights from the exhibition
Early Lucian Freud, Man with Arms Folded
He allows the sitter to breathe ... Man with Arms Folded, 1944. Copyright: Lucian Freud

I've been sitting for Lucian for around 10 years now; I visit him every morning, so it's part of my life. It's a different sense of timing to anything else I do. The stillness is very therapeutic although you can't shut off completely. You have to be alive to the position you're in and to Lucian's connection with you. You do sit very still. He might want you to move an inch or two, or slightly adjust your fingers. You have to be in tune with Lucian. He's good company to be with. It's a very gradual progress - over the months the painting grows.

  1. Lucian Freud
  2. Early Works, 1940-1958
  3. Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert,
  4. London
  5. SW1Y 6BB
  1. Starts October 9
  2. Until December 12
  3. Details:
    020-7839 7600
  4. Gallery website

Lucian was friends with many of the sitters in our exhibition. He has always taken trouble to put his sitters at ease. From the start, he would find people who could be sympathetic to him - and he to them. He has always enjoyed the company of painters and poets. They share a stillness, I suppose. Lucian has a great knowledge of poetry. His memory of words is remarkable; he can recite out loud great verses. In a way, poetry is the closest you can get to painting: distilling the essence of something to get as concentrated an idea as possible.

Painting artists and writers was a natural way for Lucian to enjoy their company. He is rather pleased to see these early paintings - he did them such a long time ago. He was only 17 or 18 when he painted Stephen Spender, the earliest of these works. It was done back in London after they'd spent a winter in a rented cottage in Snowdonia. There's a melancholic drawing of the set designer and artist Christian Bérard in the exhibition, done just weeks before his death. Bérard lived a full and quite extreme life, so this pose of him resting is very sympathetic I think. And there's an extraordinary portrait of Gerald Wilde, one of the circle of artists knocking around London in the 1950s - Lucian would see him at the French House.

There's a real inner life of the sitter in each of these portraits. That's what I've always found fascinating about his paintings. He allows the sitter to be in the painting and to breathe, it's not a portrait about Lucian Freud. You can see it quite clearly in the early portraits and throughout his whole career. The stillness of the painting, the atmosphere it creates, the reverie … it's still there in the paintings he does today of people mulling over their own lives, which is quite often what you do when you're sitting still.

There are three self-portraits in the exhibition. One of them, from 1956, is unfinished but has his forehead, eyes and nose. It's never been seen. Every couple of years, throughout his painting life, Lucian has done self-portraits. It's heavy going for him psychologically, but he sees it as a sort of a duty.

There are a lot of pieces in the show that haven't been seen for an awfully long time. The portrait of Henrietta Moraes in front of a canal hasn't been seen since the 50s. I was looking again at it the other day and I realised that her right-hand shoulder is very similar to the shoulder he's currently working on in a portrait of me. He paints in a much thicker paint these days but you can see so much of Lucian in the early pieces. It's an important little show, this.

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