A window into Lucian Freud’s soul. A Kensington neighbour reveals one of the artist’s more peculiar habits in today’s Spectator.“We were on courteous greeting terms for years, since it was his practice to have a late breakfast at Sally Clarke’s restaurant slap next door to me,” writes author Tom Stacey. “At about the turn of the century, splashes of what I took to be thickish soup began appearing on the windows of my front hall. This was puzzling. Had I upset a neighbour, who was responding with this eccentric gesture of disgust? Then in 2009 Sally rang me. ‘I have the answer,’ she said. ‘It’s Lucian. I’ve just seen him stopping as he passed your house and gobbing at your window.’”
Stacey had bought the house in the Sixties from Wynne Godley and his wife, Kitty Epstein. Kitty’s first husband, and father of two of her daughters, was Freud, on whom she walked out in 1952. “Was my hall’s front window, then, the butt of his inability to forgive an affront to his priapic vanity?”
