It is matter of letting what is inside his models emerge, bit by bit, and that requires time, hard work – his hours in the studio have always been long – and an infinity of patience. As with Leon Kossoff, Freud’s models tend to be long-standing acquaintances, relatives or friends And as for posture, people tend to lie as they fall Or crouch. Or slump.It has been a matter, throughout his life, of nurturing and keeping faith with his own emerging talents, of following them where they must lead him He has painted human beings without blinking. He has painted the flesh as he has seen it, in all its indomitable fleshliness, in all its craggy beauty and in all its awkward, messy unloveliness.Lucian Freud is at Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1 (020-7887 8008) from 20 June to 22 September. Sigmund Freud showed the world how the earliest experiences of childhood profoundly affect the sensibility of the adult you become.

Psychotherapists would surely have a field day with Sigmund’s grandson Lucian, looking for childhood clues to the combative, flesh-obsessed, appetite-sickened painter he became. Had there been a significant moment when the child was frightened by some gross adult behaviour? Why yes, there was one thing he witnessed, something so gross, intimate and frightening it would (surely) have traumatised the most steely disposition. It was when his grandfather used to remove his false teeth and snap-snap-snap them at him. Heaven only knows if it scarred Lucian for life, having his elderly, white-bearded, distinguished grandpa, the master cartographer of our unconscious terrors, gnashing those fangs at his face.

But you cannot help wondering what it was that spurred his lifelong battle with the flesh and the spirit, his unflinching gaze at pallid nakedness, his love of vastness and dereliction.It is hard to know whether horror or fascination is uppermost in his studies of the “poor, bare, forked” human body He has always striven for cold objectivity. “I’m only interested in my sitters as animals,” he once said. “I want to use, record and observe particular things about a specific person I would wish my portraits to be of people, not like them Not having the look of the sitter, being them. As far as I am concerned, the paint is the person.”As many of his sitters have found, having Lucian Freud recreate you in paint is not an unrelieved joy.