A painting by Britain's Lucien Freud, on show at Sotheby's Auction rooms, February 1998. The latest Freud self-portrait goes on show in London, showing the celebrated painter with a nude model at his feet, working on a painting of a painting being painted.(AFP/File/Johnny Eggitt)

> (AFP) The latest self-portrait of Lucien Freud goes on show in London, showing the celebrated painter with a nude model at his feet, working on a painting of a painting being painted. "The Painter is Surprised by a Naked Admirer" will be on public view at the National Portrait Gallery for three and a half weeks before it goes to the Museo Correr in Venice for a major Freud exhibition.
"It's not like anything he's done before," said writer William Feaver, a friend of the octogenarian artist, quoted in The Guardian newspaper. "It's very much a picture of how he feels and is -- a picture of being 82." The Guardian's arts reporter described the work as "a painting of a mirror image of a painting being painted -- although in fact, Freud has also added another smudged easel in the painting-within-a-painting, making it a painting of a mirror image of a painting of a painting being painted".



This picture released by the National Portrait Gallery(NPG) in London shows Lucien Freud's self-portrait entitled 'The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer'(AFP/NPG-HO)