Memories of Lucian Freud - Star Foley was seven when she was offered £5 a day to sit for the Realist painter

FOR a seven-year-old, it was not the best way to spend a Saturday.

Star Foley, who lived in Regent’s Park Road and went to Parliament Hill School, was offered £5 a day to sit for Lucian Freud. It was 1981, and the painter had wanted to recreate a piece by French artist Jean-Antoine Watteau, using his family as the models (pictured above). It took him two years to complete and was later to sell for £1.2m, which was then the largest sum ever received for a work by an English portrait artist.
 

“There were four adults and a girl and he wanted to use his grandchild, but she wasn’t well,” recalls Star. “Susie, my older sister, was going out with one of his sons and mentioned that she had twin sisters who were about the right age.”

Star recalls having to sit perfectly still for hours on end every Saturday. 

“It was quite hard, and I soon got bored by it. We had two 15-minute breaks and an hour for lunch, when he would put on the TV to watch the horse-racing,” she remembers.
 

And she also recalls how the clothes she was wearing for the first sitting soon became too small for her.

“I had to really squeeze my dungarees and shoes on and the jumper became very frayed,” she says. 

Freud worked in complete silence. “I remember thinking he was a rather strange man,” she says. “I asked him if he minded if I went to sleep and he said yes, as long as I didn’t move – which meant I was too frightened to snooze.”

She also remembers his kindness: “He said to me: ‘If you could have anything on your birthday, what would it be?’ We’d never had a TV at home so I told him that. He appeared at my house with a new set.”

And Freud would also treat her to a ride home after each session finished: “A black cab would pick me up in the morning, but he would drive me back in his Rolls Royce,” she says. “That was a real thrill.”