Published: 2 February, 2012

A MOTHER and her daughter may often clash. But less so it is said for a father and daughter.

For some reason – perhaps unfathomable – there is usually something special in their relationship.

Freud would have been able to explain it.

But it was the great-grand-daughter of Freud himself that made me think of all that.

Talking to Jane McAdam Freud this week she explained how when her father, the great painter, Lucian Freud, knew he was “on his last legs” he agreed to sit for her as a sculptor.

“In his last six months I saw a lot of him and sketched him and did a  clay model of him,” she told me. “I wanted to sculpt him 10 years ago  but he said that should be left as a memento mori. So, when he knew he was going to die, I was able to fulfil his wish.”

She talked about the time she went to live with her mother after they had split up when she was eight.

She didn’t see her father for another 23 years.

It wasn’t until she was much older that she began to want to be with him – by then she had become an established artist in her own right.

Jane McAdam Freud is still beginning to work through the grief of losing him more than six months ago. He is there with her all the time, she told me.

Looking back and thinking of all those lost years when they were apart must give a certain piquancy to her thoughts.

When I spoke to her at home on Tuesday afternoon she was busy working on another work about her father which is to be placed next to the sculpted head unveiled at the Freud Museum in Hampstead last week.

She laughed when I told her I had met him several years ago at a function and, not knowing who he was, asked him what he did. “I’m a painter,” he simply told me.

Laughing, she said: ‘“Oh, my father would have loved that – you not recognising him’,” she said. “He was a modest man.”

She said that her father’s head at the museum will be exhibited at the Gazelli Art House in Dover Street, Mayfair which has a much bigger space to show it in.

Other works by her of her father will also be exhibited there from April 25 to May 24.