When G.F. Watts died aged eighty-seven in 1904, a tribute in this Magazine suggested that his achievements, particularly his portraits, should be seen on a par with those of Titian and Rubens. More than a century later, Watts is being favourably reassessed, although he has some way to climb to attain the summit of Parnassus where the Burlington writer was sure he would be found. From reading the many obituaries of Lucian Freud, who died aged eighty-eight on 20th July, one might be forgiven for thinking that, even while still alive, he swiftly overtook Watts on the path upwards. It would seem that by his death, the world has lost not only one of the three or four greatest masters of post-War painting but also a fit companion for Rembrandt, Courbet and Manet. To support this position, a number of qualities and characteristics are frequently ascribed to him; he was resolutely his own man, his work individual and instantly recognisable; he was completely in control of his craft; he shed an unsparing light on the human condition; he took painting very seriously. Such attributes are not especially rare but when they are fused with Freud’s personal mystique – for no one would disagree that he was an undoubtedly original and fascinating character – and, it must be said, the phenomenal prices fetched by his work on the international market, then the public perception of him as a master, almost second to none, is not easily resisted. But this canonisation has obscured qualities in his work that will continue to be valued and it has over­estimated others that have little to do with what he achieved.

Freud’s perceived ‘mastery’ came late. Surely no modern painter of such international renown made a body of early work that is so innocent of the various and competing movements of twentieth-century art. For some this was a wilful disregard, wrong-footing him from the start; for others, it was an admirably single-minded way of dealing with so many conflicting modernisms at mid-century. For those less enamoured of the later studio nudes and portraits, this body of early paintings and drawings constitutes Freud’s chief claim on our attention. In such works as Girl with a kitten (1947), Interior in Paddington (1951) and Girl with a white dog (1951–52) the close focus, for­ensic line and permeating anxiety are unique, at least to British painting. There is a parallel sequence of still lifes – a fowl in a bucket, a dead monkey, brambles and thistles – that takes us through wartime austerity and culminates in the great dehydrated potted palm, a symbol of post-War rationing, in Interior in Paddington.

It is not easy to disentangle the strands that contributed to these remarkable works. Freud often denied (as have some of his apologists) any German aesthetic influences on his work. He may well have been unconscious of such connections as well as eager to emphasise his British naturalisation. But a Germanic flavour is undeniable – as a boy in Berlin, he knew reproductions of Dürer’s drawings; and, although he was too young, before his move to London, to have experienced portraits by Christian Schad or Otto Dix, their figures have a nervous inflammation of line and fearful interiority that are inescapable in, for example, Freud’s portraits of his first wife. Later influences are better embedded in the narrative of his development – from Balthus to his teacher Cedric Morris, as well as aspects of Neo-Romanticism such as the spiky linear manner, via Graham Sutherland, of the drawings of Freud’s friend John Craxton. All three were in a group show at the Lefevre Gallery in 1946 (along with Bacon and Nicholson); at the age of twenty-four the émigré prodigy was at the heart of London’s re-emerging post-War art world.

If we move forwards a quarter of a century, Freud is still highly visible and a prominent figure within a School of London context but with no international reputation to speak of. This gradually changed in the 1970s and early 1980s, particularly with his showing in the Royal Academy’s A New Spirit in Painting in 1981. From then on there was no escaping his work through innumerable exhibitions in Britain and abroad and many substantial publications. He was awarded the Order of Merit in 1993, ninety years after it had been awarded to Watts.

For a painter as essentially, yet riskily conservative as Freud, this very traditionalism, expressed through a little-changing studio campaign of models in relay, came to seem almost radical. Such ‘modernity’ was eagerly welcomed by those who were perhaps flummoxed or marginally fatigued by restless innovation. The garrulous brushstrokes and fondling of the etching needle, the long completion time of each work in which the ennui of posing becomes part of the subject, the very persistence of Freud’s mapping of heads and bodies – all this contributed to an almost legendary status. There was too a voyeuristic element to this wide appeal, not so much from the contemplation of naked figures that before had never seemed to have been so rawly served up, but more perhaps from who or what might come next from this alchemist’s laboratory in which alienation and defeat were being redefined. Amid the long-familiar Sickertian furniture and studio props, the unfettered figures in sometimes freakish poses led Freud along a weirdly compelling tightrope between grand ambition and the seriously camp. Never sen­timental or comic or witty and only occasionally warm, his work is pervaded by his narrow investigation into what human beings look like as they speed or shuffle towards the grave.

Over the years the identity of many of Freud’s sitters has been revealed – from titled patrons to the denizens of Soho’s Colony Room club, from writers and fellow artists to lovers and family members. If the selection of next year’s exhibition devoted to Freud’s portraits at London’s National Portrait Gallery (9th February to 27th May) rigorously concentrates on named, clothed sitters, it may well place Freud higher than we might imagine – alongside Watts, John, Epstein, Spencer and Sutherland, to go no further than the British shores that Freud espoused.