Duchess of Cambridge at the NPG
February 9 2012
Video: Telegraph
Last night, the Duchess of Cambridge made her first solo royal engagement at the National Portrait Gallery, where she saw a private view of the Lucien Freud exhibition. That the Duchess should choose to support the NPG at this moment is excellent news not just for that gallery, but for the arts in Britain in general.
The above flash-filled video gives an idea of just how much press interest the Duchess has to deal with, even when she goes to a museum. I like the way the photographers first try to get her attention by shouting 'Catherine', then, not having much luck, with a politer 'Ma'am'.
Meanwhile, the exhibition has gone down well with the critics. Here is Brian Sewell's conclusion:
I am told that Freud loved to hate me. I did not hate him; nor do I hate his paintings - it is only that I share neither his lust for ugliness nor his taste for furfuraceous paint, and wish that he had found a different escape from the trap of beautiful Neo-Romanticism. I wish that he had always painted sheets and wiping rags in the white paint in which he clad his mother in 1982-4, when Sargent and Pontormo seem to have held his hand, and given us more such exquisite details as the rat in the hand of a naked man and the fringed blanket in Flora with Blue Toenails of 2000-1, the hand of the octogenarian not trembling. When all is said and done, for all his perversity, Freud was perhaps as great a figurative painter as is now possible, and he is well-served by this exhibition.
