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I WAS curious  about the little man in a shabby raincoat walking in front of me in the emptying St Bride’s Church.   

A memorial service  for the former editor of the Observer, David Astor, had just finished and the congregation was making its way to special coaches waiting to take them to a reception at the Reform Club.

Catching up with the little man, I didn’t ask him who he was but, strangely, what did he do?  “I’m a painter,” he replied. And – dare I say this! – I thought he meant he was a painter and decorator.
 

Of course, as I discovered later at the Reform Club, he was the great Lucian Freud .

Last week I got into conversation with another painter, Nahem Shoa, a pupil of Robert Lenkiewicz  whose works were being exhibited at the Clarendon Gallery in Dover Street, Mayfair. 
 

Nahem linked both Lenkiewicz and Freud as Jewish painters who were obsessed with figurative paintings in response to  the nightmare of the Holocaust. 

Both, thought Nahem, had lost relatives in camps and their response – perhaps subconsciously – was to recreate the human form as proof that Hitler’s act of madness had failed. 

Lenkiewicz alone painted at least 500 human figures every year.