At the back of a cupboard, not long after the death of her father, Lucian Freud, Rose Boyt came across an old cardboard box containing hundreds of typed pages, numbered and neatly stacked. It was her half-forgotten diary from 1978, when she was nineteen. As she remembered it, the portrait she sat for then was benign, the sittings arduous but uncontroversial. But reading the diary, she was shocked. She had completely erased how difficult the process had been, how many of his anecdotes, though entertaining, were way more lurid than she remembered and how unmanageable he could be. Naked Portrait explores Boyt’s complicated relationship with her adored father, the power imbalance in their relationship and her adulation of him. It is also a viscerally honest account of complex family dynamics, of a difficult childhood and the vulnerability of young women, told with great love and compassion.
Rose Boyt was born in London and as a child lived on a cargo ship trading in the Baltic and beyond. With her mother and siblings she emigrated to the Caribbean, but the family was repatriated. She left home when she was fifteen and in the seventies began to take photographs and had a Saturday job at the punk shop Seditionaries. In the eighties she worked as a DJ and on the door of the Caf? De Paris, and is the author of three novels.
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