On a wall in Dorset floats one of the most beautiful flowers in modern British art: a pink cyclamen, painted as a mural by Lucian Freud in Coombe Priory, where he and his second wife Caroline Blackwood had come to live in 1953.
Freud was 31, collected by Kenneth Clark, and selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale; but his hard-lined hyper-realism mocked by the bitter Douglas Cooper as in ‘a central European tradition of nasty illustration for nasty children’s books’. In the popular press he was the wild grandson of Sigmund Freud, who had eloped with the daughter of Maureen, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, and a Guinness heiress.
Blackwood – yet to become the seriously good, seriously icy writer of books such as Great Granny Webster – bought Freud an Alvis sports car for £3,000, and, together, this Jacobean house, sunk in a quiet valley with a black lake. Later, in flat after flat, Freud surrounded himself with potted plants; Coombe was the one home in which he gardened and planted trees. He painted Annie, his daughter by his first marriage, standing in the garden with a pet dog held to her cheek; every detail is tender, to the cuff of her jersey.
One neighbour, at Reddish House in Wiltshire, was Cecil Beaton: of Freud he wrote ‘His painting is immensely personal and he works with a meticulous and poetic realism’. In April 1956 he photographed the Freuds at home, with Lucian haloed by the curls of cyclamen: ‘black curly hair, intensely restless eyes’. In another he stands beside a purchase of bay trees; another, with a stag’s head and in a dandy’s drill trousers.
The cyclamen mural was never finished but has a calm joy unlike Freud’s portraits of this time, and its sap and colour echo the flower pieces of Cedric Morris, with whom Freud studied at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing at Benton End, Suffolk; he rejected tuition at the London art schools, but Morris let the teenage prodigy come, go, and do as he wished. There is a film of Lucian at 16 walking round a garden in London with his grandfather, in the months after Sigmund’s escape from Vienna; as biographer William Feaver writes, ‘Lucian performs one of his running somersaults and makes a dash for the camera as though aiming to knock it senseless.’
One of his grandfather’s most famous and perplexing essays is the Dream of the Botanical Monograph, which begins: ‘That morning I had seen a new book in the window of a bookshop, bearing the title The Genus Cyclamen – evidently a monograph on that plant. Cyclamens, I reflected, were my wife’s favourite flowers and I reproached myself for so rarely remembering to bring her flowers, which was what she liked…’ The dream ‘turns out to have been in the nature of a self-justification, a plea on behalf of my own rights… I may allow myself to do this.’
Lucian claimed never to have read the Dream, objecting, ‘I mightn’t have done it [painted cyclamen] if I’d known that.’ But in 1959 he began a second cyclamen mural, at Chatsworth, as one of the first guests to be invited when the 11th Duke of Devonshire moved his family back into the vacated house. Painted in a private bathroom are two flowers and two buds, commissioned as a respite from the Sabine women lathered by Sir James Thornhill over the bedroom next door. The estate greenhouse brought pot after pot: he liked cyclamen because ‘They die in such a dramatic way… They crash down, their stems turn to jelly and their veins harden.’
That mural was never finished, and high on a shelf at Chatsworth is a box of paints lettered: ‘Mr Frued [sic]: Please do not remove from here’. Into old age, Freud bought cyclamen at Covent Garden Market. At Coombe, the fern in the background of Annie’s portrait still grows in the cracks of grey-green stone.
‘Lucian Freud: Plant Portraits’ runs at the Garden Museum until 5 March 2023. For information, visit gardenmuseum.org.uk. To discover more about the art history of Cyclamens, you can read Olivia Meehan’s Flower Press story
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