More Rosebud - Rose Boyt

Rosebud with Gyles Brandreth

Gyles Brandreth / Plain Jaine Media

Society & Culture, Unknown

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 10 June 2025

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Rose Boyt tells Gyles about her unconventional childhood, and about her experiences of being parented by - and painted by - her father Lucian Freud, the celebrated modern artist. This is an extraordinary story: even Gyles is bowled over by the twists and turns of Rose's childhood. Rose's parents were Lucian Freud and the artist Susie Boyt, with whom Freud had three other children. He also had many other children with other women - 14 children in all - and was never a conventional husband or father to any of them. But he was brilliant - dazzlingly entertaining, talented, intelligent and inspiring - and Rose experienced this at first hand when she was painted by him for a nude portrait which is the starting point for her book, Naked Portrait. Rose also spent a year living on a cargo ship in the Baltic, DJ'd with Neneh Cherry, and was briefly engaged to Andy Warhol. This is a fascinating interview about Rose, about Lucian Freud, about the artistic life, and about alternative ways of living and looking at the world.

Rose Boyt's book, Naked Portrait is out in paperback, published by Picador. It is highly recommended.

This episode was recorded at the JW Marriott Grosvenor House in London.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Harriet, I was thinking I'm noted for my capacity for name-dropping.
0:07.0	Mm. Harriet, I was thinking I'm noted for my capacity for name-dropping.
0:24.5	And I've been fascinated by famous people since I was a boy.
0:30.0	And I remember once being driven by my father, in the 1950s I was a very little boy, through London, and we were in Knightsbridge,
0:40.2	and going up the steps into a hotel was a large man. And my father said, that's Randolph. I thought
0:48.2	Randolph. I've heard of Rudolph, the Red Nose Reindeer, Randolph. My father knew who this was,
0:53.6	and it was Randolph Churchill,
0:56.2	the son of Winston Churchill. But my father recognized him. And my father was excited. There is
1:03.1	something about the glamour of fame. And the reason I've been doing this is I've been thinking
1:07.7	about our special guest today. And A, how extraordinary she is,
1:13.7	but also that her father is somebody who is truly world famous, which is unusual, and is not
1:22.5	a film star or a writer, he's a painter, a British painter. It's Lucian Freud. And his paintings now sell for literally
1:35.5	tens of millions. So who is our guest? So she is the daughter, one of the daughters of Lucien Freud, who had many children.
1:48.1	And that's partly why she's so interesting, because she grew up in this very unconventional
1:52.5	bohemian way. It said that this great artist may have had 14 children. I think he has 14
1:59.8	that were in his will, acknowledged children.
2:02.9	And I always think it's fascinating these people who have a lot of children.
2:06.5	I wonder what makes people feel, particularly people as they get older, feel they can go on
2:11.8	having children.
2:14.1	Well, nowadays, I think they're saying we should be doing it.
2:17.7	Well, that's because people...
2:18.6	The birth rate's gone down.
	...

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