Throughout his work, he seems to be touching the figures rather than observing them. They are naked but you can see so much, even though there are no clothes to inform you what might be going on, or what the personality is. It’s minimal but riveting – you’re curious about the person and although they’re naked, they reveal so much: they never become nudes without a story. I think it’s the way he wraps them up in paint and the way the paint describes them that is what gives them that presence It’s a marvellous achievement, and no-one has ever done it It always makes me curious.

He is a remarkable artist.Peter BlakeI do think that he is a great painter and I particularly like the early work – that’s bound to infuriate him because it’s always extremely irritating when people say that The thing is, I like that highly finished style. He is at his best with pictures like the family group based on the Watteau: he really is an extraordinary painter. And I suppose the thing is that, as the oldest figurative artist, he has the longevity.Mark QuinnI wish I could paint like Lucian Freud because his painting is everything about why painting has not been displaced by photography: it’s mediated through the human mind and includes the element of time. The self-portrait where he is standing in his boots stands up to everything done by Rembrandt I think he gets better and better as he gets older.. The largest retrospective of Lucian Freud’s work ever to be mounted will give us an unprecedented opportunity to evaluate the range and overall achievement of an artist who is now widely regarded as the greatest living realist painter of the human figure.

More than 160 paintings, etchings and drawings in all will be on view, from a very accomplished apprentice work of the late 1930s called Box of Apples in Wales, to four portraits completed in the painter’s studio earlier this year. Throughout the greater part of a century that saw the emergence of one soon-to-be-jaded artistic “ism” after another, Freud has guarded his professional privacy, maintaining a fiercely aloof apartness from it all, as if nothing really mattered but the question of his own self-betterment as a painter. His masters have, for the most part, been dead ones: Courbet, Ingres, Rodin, Velazquez, Degas, Manet, C?nne. He has gone to each of them in turn, seeking sips of sustenance on the way, as he pursued a fiercely individualistic destiny. Above all, he seems never to have heard anyone say that painting as a means of communicating a singular vision of the world might, after all, be dead or, at best, hopelessly d?d?He has always known that it could still be singularly alive, in a way that mere photography could never be.The show begins with the aforementioned still life of a box of apples firmly set against a view of Welsh hills.