ASTONISHMENT, even disgust, often greeted Lucian Freud's
paintings when they first appeared. In “Benefits Supervisor
Sleeping” a mountainous friend lay snoozing on a sofa, one
blubbery breast cupped in a hand, revelling in rolls of fat like
a beached whale. In “Naked Man with Rat” a surprised fellow
fondled a rodent perilously near his engorged genitalia. Female
nudes—sometimes the artist's own grown-up daughters—lay rudely
splayed, or tangled up in sheets. Bare flesh, vulnerable,
cushiony, shiny, lumpish pink-white thickly shadowed in grey and
blue, was everywhere. The best painter in the world, as he was
often said to be, seemed intent on rubbing the world's nose in
human ugliness. His candour was shocking.  What viewers did not
always realise was that Mr Freud wanted to shock himself. Each
portrait was a risk. Every time he approached a sitter—thrusting
a piece of torn sheet into his belt as an apron, scraping a
clean space on his heavily encrusted palette, knocking the dried
paint off the tube-ends in a s