LUCIAN FREUD: ETCHINGS 1946-2004
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

LUCIAN FREUD IN THE STUDIO
National Portrait Gallery

SET AN ARTIST to rummage through a national collection and you can expect the unexpected. When Lucian Freud made his selection for the National Gallery’s Painter’s Eye series of shows, the result seemed at first to lack rhyme or reason. Strange little fatherless fragments nudged warranted masterpieces on the walls; the centuries clashed and jangled with one another.

Then the penny dropped. Every piece included something which was positively ugly. The only mystery was whether Freud himself saw them in that light, or whether what was ugly to others was to him beautiful. Or did he recognise no distinction?

Looking at his own work suggests that this is the truth. In the new Wallace Collection show of his most recent work, uglification is rampant. Why at the Wallace Collection, normally devoted to the long dead? Apparently Freud has a show impending at his New York dealers, and wanted the work to be seen in London first in a non-commercial context.

Possibly also he wanted to challenge comparison with some of the painters, prominent in the Collection, that he is known to admire. Watteau in particular, whom he has confronted and pastiched: remember his Large Interior, W 11 (after Watteau) of 1981-83, based on Pierrot Content.

These new paintings are a clear continuation of his work of the last decade. There are portraits, of human beings (a solicitor, a brigadier) and of animals (a whippet, an Arab gelding), and it is typical of him that one does not feel the need to distinguish between the two: Freud casts the same cold eye on both, though possibly he likes the animals better.

The portraits are paradoxical in that they are in no way conventionally flattering, but seem to be universally approved of by their subjects. No doubt it is partly because the men in them are made to look powerful and therefore somehow glamorous. This even applies to his recent view of the ebullient David Hockney, who is largely, if not entirely, annexed to Freud’s own private world. Even Freud’s pictures of his many grandchildren seem penetrating rather than affectionate, and the life of the paintings comes from the manipulation of texture rather than variations of palette.

Not much new there or at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s retrospective, which in some 60 etchings assembles almost Freud’s complete oeuvre as a printmaker. Its starting date, in 1946, may surprise: though Freud experimented a little with the medium in Paris after the war — the image of his first wife, Ill in Paris, dates from this period — he did not take up etching until the Eighties, after his style had changed from the crisp, neatly outlined early works to the virtuoso manipulation of paint in his later art.

Anyone hoping for more light on Freud from David Dawson’s photographic series Lucian Freud in the Studio at the National Portrait Gallery will be disappointed: he could just as well be the local plumber who has just dropped in. But then, Freud has always played his cards close to his chest.

• Latest Paintings, the Wallace Collection, W1 (020-7563 9500) to Apr 18; Etchings, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (0131-624 6200) to June 13; In the Studio: Photographs by David Dawson, National Portrait Gallery, WC2 (020-7312 7463) to Aug 1