Breakfast with Lucian Freud
This morning was perfect. It was a privilege to enjoy this extraordinary self-portrait by the artist in the special intimacy of his studio on Kensington Church Street. While the painting was made in 1956 in his studio on Delamere Terrace in Paddington, the presence of the painter was very real. Breakfast at Sally Clarke’s is always wonderful and what better way than to look at paintings by Freud in the place where he often sat. Thank you
@davidelidawson @sallyclarkeltd @christiesinc for making it possible.
Sally Clarke remembers Lucian Freud’s morning ritual:
“It must have been one day in the early 1990s that Mr Freud first wandered into our little shop. Then already in his 70s, he had bought a house five doors up from us on Kensington Church Street and was in the process of moving out of his painting studio in Holland Park in which he had been living. Over the next few months, he also began to visit our restaurant. He would ring up and announce, “This is Lucian Freud.” I would tease him, asking in reply, “Lucy and who?” There would be a long silence, after which he would ask to reserve a table…
The daily ritual began around 7:45 am when he and David Dawson, his studio assistant and frequent model, would arrive for breakfast. David would have bought newspapers from the little corner shop, a stack of five, six, seven newspapers. Mr Freud would slip in and head to his regular table, placing his order en route: a juice, a coffee, or sometimes an Earl Grey tea, a pain aux raisins, and scrambled eggs, eggs Benedict or eggs Royale. In those days, our pain aux raisins were even bigger than the ones that we make now, so it almost filled the whole plate. When he did order tea, he would add copious amounts of cold milk, so it was the most revolting colour by the time he’d finished mixing it in his cup. He would also usually grab a bar of our nougat when cutting through the shop, slipping it into his pocket as a joke.“
