Whatever estimate may be placed upon Lucian Freud's 'naked portraits' by future generations, it is unlikely that they will ever be attributed to any time other than ours. Just as the regents and regentesses of Frans Hals (a painter with whom Freud has something in common) unquestionably belong to seventeenth- century Holland, so Freud's subjects seem indubitably to be children of this troubled century. Their modernity is not in question.

‘Although I have drawn and painted from landscapes and people constantly I have never finished a picture without first experiencing a huge emptying of all factual and topographical knowledge,’ writes Leon Kossoff. ‘And always, the moment before finishing, the painting disappears, sometimes into greyness for ever, or sometimes into a huge heap on the floor to be reclaimed, redrawn and committed to an image which makes itself.’

David Bomberg drew a charcoal self-portrait in 1932 when he was 42 years old. As a young man he had been widely acclaimed for his ‘avant-garde’ paintings but when he became disillusioned with modernism interest in his work withered. The slant of his eyes and the line of his lips reveal both his contempt for the critics who shunned him and his stubborn determination. The strength of the heavy, binding outline joining the dome of the skull to that proud jaw seems like a declaration that he is not a broken man.