Lucian Freud reveals more about himself in his Recent Works than ever before. Andrew Graham-Dixon reports

JUST WHO does Lucian Freud think he is? A bit of a devil, on the evidence of his most recent self- portrait. Painter Working, Reflection is Freud turning the tables on Freud: the observer observed; the painter of nudes painted in the nude. It is not a pretty sight.
 
Freud looking at his own reflection sees a pallid satyr getting on in years, palette in one hand, palette knife in the other. Self-observation is tinged with self-mockery. Painting himself, the painter acknowledges his own mortality. Under the glare of an electric lightbulb in a barely furnished interior he looks himself in the eye.
 
Freud's self-portrait (like all self- portraits) is not just a painter's record of his appearance but a statement, for the record, of how he would like to be remembered: an artist who did not flinch from reality, not even the reality of his own encroaching decrepitude; a man who faced facts. Freud is often said to be a deeply reclusive man but he may not be quite as shy of publicity as his reputation suggests. Painter Working, Reflection is a subtle exercise in self-promotion and although it might ostensibly be a vanitas there is nonetheless a kind of vanity behind it.
 
The picture is by some distance the most remarkable work in ''Lucian Freud: Recent Works'', at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. It is one of those singular paintings that artists sometimes paint: an oddity, a freak - which, precisely because it departs so radically from the norms of a painter's practice, makes the qualities of the rest of his oeuvre suddenly more apparent.
 
Comparing Freud's painting of himself with Freud's paintings of other people you notice the...

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