They were hardly the embodiment of the youthful dream of love: he leaned over, in paint-splattered trousers with a thin scarf tied loosely around his neck; She was fair, stylish and though pregnant, she was the elf face that adorned countless magazine covers.
Yet for a few prime weeks exactly 20 years ago, Lucian Freud and model Kate Moss were an inseparable, if unlikely, couple — dancing at Annabel’s, having a duke’s meal at trendy restaurants and late-night artists and muse. As was sitting.
Their collaboration produced one of the most startling paintings of Freud’s long career. Her near-life-size, full-length study found Moss not as a Wifey-like supermodel but as a physically impressive, pregnant woman lying naked on a bed.
It also gave rise to a flood of rumors and speculation about the nature of the relationship between the womanizing Rue and the hedonistic party girl. Such was Freud’s reputation, the 51-year age difference didn’t stop some of the more erotic gossip. He was 79 at the time and Kate was just 28.
In fact, the attraction was mutual, with Moss later describing Freud as ‘the most interesting person’ she had ever met.
Close up: Moss comforts Freud as he recovers from a freak accident
Now, two decades later, the model has agreed to make a film about the growing intimacy between her and Freud, who died in 2011 at the age of 88. Perhaps to ensure artistic integrity, she is serving as executive producer.
The story, simply titled Moss & Freud, is being produced by screenwriter and director James Lucas, who won an Oscar in 2015 for best live action short film, The Phone Call.
“It was an honor and an incredible experience to sit down for Lucian,” says Moss. After watching ‘The Phone Call,’ I knew James would convey the emotion in the story in a fitting way, it’s memoir-worthy.
‘Having been involved in the project and script development from the beginning, I am very excited to see the film come to life now.’
There is no word yet on who will play the lead character.
So far so complicated. For the model who rarely gives interviews, the bio-pic promises to offer a rare glimpse into Moss’s notoriously private world.
Earlier this week she shed a little more light on that secrecy when she publicly defended her ex-boyfriend Johnny Depp during the actor’s defamation lawsuit.
Appearing as a witness via video link, he refuted the claim that he had once pushed her down the stairs.
In the mid-1990s the romance with Depp was already over and Moss was pregnant with their daughter, Lila Grace, when she was unexpectedly drawn into the bohemian surroundings of Britain’s greatest living artist, rumored to have That she had 500 lovers – a number to compare with even the most accomplished of Hollywood’s heartthrobs.
Mutual affection: Couple meeting in a street in London, 2003
If she was concerned that many of Freud’s female subjects were often his romantic partners, or became his lovers after sitting for him, she did not say so.
A ruthless seductress with no interest in traditional family life, Freud accepted 14 children by six women—though some have speculated that he may have been born as early as 40.
Kate was not the first pregnant fashionista whom the artist drew on canvas. She was equally fixated on Mick Jagger’s Texas-born ex-wife, Jerry Hall, and portrayed her when she was eight months pregnant with their fourth child.
But, angered by the lack of punctuality for their meetings, she erased it from the portrait of her breastfed baby, Gabriel.
Her reaction to her reckless punctuality was both amusing and brutal, replacing Hall’s head—while maintaining her body—with her assistant, David Dawson.
Moss, brought up on strict rules of modeling time-sheets, was never likely to insult the artist by missing appointments like Jerry.
As Freud himself later said of their partnership: ‘She was only as late as the girls are, 18 minutes late. I was crossed but tried to ignore it. I used other means to get him on time, like sending someone to pick him up.’
So how did they get together? And why did Freud, who preferred not to portray famous people, fall for the charm of a model who was at the height of his celebrity?
Eventually, he refused to portray Princess Diana, claiming that she could not get past her ‘glitter of glamour’.
In her eyes, well-known people become ‘hardened’ as if they have ‘grown a second skin because they have been seen so much’.
For the same reason, he refused to portray the Pope.
With Moss, however, he was as concerned with his hard-partying reputation as his fame and glamour.
She, like Freud, was wildly unpredictable.
‘I liked his company,’ he told his biographer, Geordi Gregg. ‘She was , , Full of amazing behaviour.’
In fact, the seeds of this very unusual pairing began long before Moss set foot in Freud’s West London studio. In an interview with the genre magazine Dazed and Confused, which was edited by Moss’s boyfriend at the time, Jefferson Hack (and later the father of his daughter), he acknowledged that Freud was one of his heroes.
‘I would really like to meet Lucian Freud,’ she said. ‘I heard he was really good.’
She continued: ‘Like, at 80, she’s really hip and frankly cool.’ Whatever pleasure Freud may have taken from the comment, it must have been blunted by the overestimation of his age. At that time – the interview was in June 1998 – Freud was 75 years old.
As the new millennium began, Freud was as busy – and, crucially, successful – as he ever was. Figures such as Madonna sought to be painted by her, but he was not impressed by her bid.
Artist’s collection: Freud’s painting of a pregnant Kate Moss
Instead, in 2001, to the surprise of many, he decided to portray the Queen. Critics were divided by his treatment, with one accusing the artist of shadowing him at five and another complaining that it made him look like one of his corgis.
It hardly mattered to Freud who had not forgotten the interview with Moss. He sought the opinion of his fashion designer daughter, Bella, whose clothes were worn by Moss.
‘I asked Bella if it’ [the interview] was true. When I heard that she said she wanted to be painted by me, I asked Bella to send her the rounds.’
They met at Clark’s restaurant, which was close to his home in Kensington, West London, and reportedly ‘like a house on fire’.
He was fascinated not only by her appearance, but also by her Croydon origins and he quickly forgot his condition about depicting only ‘real’ people, not those ‘practicing holders of currency’, as There was definitely moss.
It took Freud six months and a year of regular meetings to complete a painting, but Moss was unconvinced. Her pregnancy set a natural deadline. And instead of fret, he embraced the novelty of it all.
It was also nice to pose for a man whose last famous subject was the queen, even though the brutally drawn portrait is hardly to Her Majesty’s liking.
The awkward couple soon settled into a routine. Dinner first at the chic Locanda Locatelli in Mayfair or the Marquee in South Kensington before retiring to his studio to pick up brushes and paint in Freud’s classic Bentley.
Then it was at his house where she used to sit and he would paint till 2 o’clock, sometimes even later.
A canvas is said to have been destroyed because the perfectionist painter was not satisfied.
At the time of their collaboration there was no painter alive with a reputation as taboo or sexual as Freud, for which the long line of female sitars before Moss could certainly testify.
His friend, the late critic and author Danielle Farson, said, ‘Like Svengali, he charms women with dedication.
Inevitably, when news of these late-night meetings of Moss and Freud surfaced, questions were raised about the closeness of the artist and model.
Despite her own spirited life in the spotlight, it’s unlikely she could have taught the Old Master much about partying or foreign behavior. For Freud, painting and sex were not unrelated. According to his confidante John Richardson, they were interchangeable.
Richardson said, ‘He turns sex into art and art into sex.
At that time Freud, like Moss, had a companion – the lively journalist Emily Byrne. At 28, she was very similar to Moss, and had also been the subject of several portraits of her boyfriend.
“There was definitely a connection between Kate and Lucian — a friendship for sure,” recalls a figure who saw the two together.
‘He loved to dance and her too, and they both loved to sing.
‘But was there anything else? I’m not sure.’
It is certain that their relationship survived the finished picture, even though Freud was not entirely happy with it. He later said that it ‘didn’t really work’.
Asked why, he replied: ‘It’s like asking a footballer after a match why he didn’t score.’
It was still sold at auction for £3.5 million to an unnamed bidder.
As for their relationship, there was another, equally enduring keepsake—the tattoo she inscribed on two small swallows at the base of Moss’s spine.
Remarkably, he did so when they boarded a taxi.
Freud, who learned his technique during World War II while serving in the merchant navy, described how he drew birds and rubbed them in Indian ink using a pin until blood came out. It was, he described his biographer as ‘very primitive’.
Meanwhile, new mother Kate was making changes in her personal life. After splitting from Jefferson Hacks 18 months after the birth of her daughter, she hooked up with drug-addicting musician Pete Doherty, who only this week made the disturbing claim that she had cut off both of her ears—a paparazzi’s. One in a brawl with, and the other at a pub in Stoke. It was the beginning of a dark, embarrassing period in the young model’s life.
Freud was present intermittently after arriving at a party held for him in 2004, where he said he enjoyed ’20 minutes of intense dancing’ before he left.
Unlike many of his deceptive female muses, painted and then discarded, Freud maintained a tactile soft spot for models.
A year before his death, he suffered a bizarre accident while shooting a promotional film with a zebra. Dragging Freud to the ground and dragging him to the floor, the animal got scared and jumped up. Panicked colleagues rushed her to the hospital, but she had suffered nothing but a groin strain.
Kate was famously photographed hugging Freud while he was recovering in bed.
It remains to be seen how much of the intimacy that is clearly part of this most enigmatic relationship brings to the screen. Either way, the story of Kate Moss and Lucian Freud will forever be one of the art world’s most fascinating encounters.