'It's me looking at him looking at me': there is more than one way to achieve a likeness, as Martin Gayford describes in this vivid account of sitting to Lucian Freud for two portraits, one painted and one etched. Both are currently on show in the Freud exhibition at the Museo Correr, Venice

Apollo, August, 2005 by Martin Gayford

This summer in Venice I met myself twice. Of course, I was expecting that to happen. As had long been planned, two portraits of me--an oil entitled Man with a Blue Scarf (2003-2004; Fig. 2) and an etching, Portrait Head (2005; Fig. 1)--were included in the Lucian Freud exhibition that is currently at the Museo Correr. But although I knew I would be there, it still came as a surprise.

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It is an insufficiently remarked aspect of good pictures that it is impossible to memorise them. No matter how well you know them, they always seem different when you see them again (this point has been made to me by two apparently very different artists, Luc Tuymans and Richard Serra). As John Carey is at pains to argue in his new book What Good are the Arts?, a certain work of art may produce quite different feelings in different people; in fact, it evokes altered responses in the same person at differing times (its ability to carry doing that is one of the qualities that makes art good). I thought I knew these images as well as anyone could, except their creator. I watched them grow week by week, touch by touch. And yet I found that somehow, when I saw them again, they looked new.

The fact that they were on public display was another complication. Lucian wrote, many years ago, some words that suggest that an exact likeness is not and cannot be the point of portraiture: 'The artist who tries to serve nature is only an executive artist. And, since the model he so faithfully copies is not going to be hung up next to the picture, since the picture is going to be there on its own, it is of no interest whether it is an accurate copy of the model.' Generally, that's true. But during the private view in Venice, I was there for quite some time in the room where William Feaver--the curator--had hung the etching and the oil (in company with the Queen, David Hockney and Andrew Parker-Bowles).

I compared the two images myself, and listened to other people's comments. There were many compliments for Man with a Blue Scarf, which I scarcely deserved, since I had done nothing more than sit there while it was being painted. There were also quite different reactions. 'It's quite a hot, romantic portrait,' said a prominent dealer--which was gratifying. On the other hand, a painter friend remarked that it reminded him of Gericault's portraits of the mad--'Those staring eyes'--which was less.

The etching was less commented on--'It's harder to get into', said the director of a national museum. In William Feaver's view it shows I have 'a dark side'. Portrait Head 2005 is, I think, in a straightforward way, less like me: the face elongated and crumpled as if I had been subject to torsion by the violent forces in the air that seem to swirl around my head. But I accept them both as aspects of me. There are, as Lucian hints, many ways of being a portrait.

Thus Freud's self portraits all look very different, but are clearly all him--though it may be a long time before you happen to see him in the mood, at the angle, and in the light that were the basis for a certain picture. He makes a conscious effort, in fact, to make them as unlike each other as possible in format, and in every other way.

It was the same with the two pictures of me. It was planned that the etching should follow the painting. Indeed, Freud had an idea that he would start a drawing for the new work at the final session for Man with a Blue Scarf. No sooner had the final brush stroke gone on, than he would pick up the chalk and start the new work. In the event, we ran out of time. But the etching began a few weeks later. Right from the first sitting, however, he announced that it would be 'very different'. And so it turned out to be: optically, technically and in feeling.

Looking at the two images now, I can see that--from my own point of view--they respond to changed moods and circumstances. Man with a Blue Scarf is in part, I think, a painting of my own fascination with the whole process of being painted. The sittings, although a marathon--around 130 hours from November to July--were invariably fascinating to me; and I see that intensity of interest in the picture. It's me looking at him looking at me.

Often Freud's sitters seem either to drop into a reverie--a state that his assistant David Dawson has described as when people are most themselves--or actually doze. Small Portrait 2001 (Fig. 4) and the beautiful Woman with Eyes Closed 2002 (Fig. 3) illustrate those two states. I, as an art critic and historian, was perhaps unusual in being absorbed from beginning to end by what was going on.

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It was furthermore a night picture. This is an iron distinction in Lucian's work, though not one that is always noted by critics. Although at the end we had a few daytime sittings, they were always by artificial light with shutters closed. It is crucial for him that the light source should be constant for any given picture. It this case it was a pool of electric illumination, cast by a powerful lamp hanging from the ceiling about half way between us. He stood at the easel and looked down on me, sitting in a chair.