Reader's Digest: March 8, 2025

The artist Celia Paul has appeared in these pages twice, once in relation to Gwen John—to whom she addressed a wonderful book—and once, unidentified, as the naked girl with an egg in a Lucian Freud painting.

I had known that Paul had posed for Freud, but not that she was the model for this particular piece, which I came to know, first, through a feminist critique in a poem by Vicki Feaver, who was married to Freud’s biographer.

Paul’s first book, Self-Portrait, was, among other things, an attempt to extricate herself from a supporting role in Freud’s mythos:

By writing about myself in my own words, I have made my life my own story. Lucian, particularly, is made part of my story rather than, as is usually the case, me being portrayed as part of his.

These lines are quoted by Karl Ove Knausgard in a New Yorker profile of Paul that takes in her recent self-portraits as well as a new painting of Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, and Lucian Freud, entitled Colony of Ghosts.

Self-…