Treasures from Chatsworth Episode 1

Lucent Freud's picture of my mother was something which was so completely different to anything that anybody had seen. Some of the Duke's parents friends were really quite shocked, some of them actually wanting it covered when they were in the room. The world's greatest collectors are not only defined by great wealth. Sotheby's takes you inside Chatsworth House, the ancestral home of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. Discover the passion that has driven 16 generations of the Cavendish family to create one of the world's most extraordinary art collections. A woman in a white shirt is probably the most beautiful thing at Chatsworth, not just because it's of my mother but because it's a beautiful painting in its own right. But it wasn't always accepted as a great work of art, certainly when it was painted in the late 50s. I think that people were completely not ready for Freud's work at that time. They were shocked and pretty upset. He titled the painting provocatively Woman in a White Shirt, so he strips her of her title in a way solely focusing on something which he sees. I was about 15 years old and I had plenty of time and so I decided that I needed to really look at it in a way that I'd never looked at a painting before. So I did, I sat and I probably looked at it for half an hour at a time, often. And I quite quickly realised that it was far more beautiful. The initial impact is of a rather sad old woman. My mother was not sad, she was very beautiful. She was 38 years old when she was painting and you get that if you look at it for a while, at least I did. She did have a long and happy life but it didn't come without its difficulties like everyone else. And I think this comes out in the portrait more than any other. Everything you see on the canvas is informed by hours and hours of discussion, friendship, integrity. I think he thought she was very beautiful. He was determined to paint something with much more depth than just a lightness. And because my mother had sat for him for three hours a day for months, they became great friends. And so he came to stay when we first moved in and his name is the first name in our business book in his rather childish pencil writing. My father, he liked being with him so he liked talking to him about commissions and those things. And I imagine my parents must have paid him some money. He hafted a mural on a little bathroom upstairs with flowers and leaves on it. He left his paints behind and they were put in a cardboard box. And of course then they were just rubbish and they were about to be thrown away but I think my mother said you better hang on to them, I'll give them back to him when I see him next or something. So we've kept them and now they'll always be kept I think. The studio he had where this was painted was in Paddington. It had two great big windows facing north and it was pretty scruffy and horrible and he kept the meters inside his room because he didn't want to and he often couldn't pay for the electricity or the water. Sometimes when he was painting me a few years later the doorbell would go and Lucien would look out of the window into the street and realise it was somebody who'd come to cut off one of the surfaces. So we'd stand between the windows while this guy was ringing the bell and ringing the bell. The strange thing was that Lucien nearly always had 10 or 15 pounds on him which in those days would easily have paid the bill but he was a very keen gambler and he had a horse to back that afternoon so he wanted to keep it for the bookies. Lucien probably was the artist who had the greatest access to not only high society but also every other demimonde that was possibly going. He did have one foot in the underworld and he liked a bit of danger. He didn't mind fighting at all. My father commissioned this portrait and there was nothing in his mind about investment. He wouldn't have ever dreamt that it was something that would become valuable. The commissioning of the Freud's was partly inspiration by my father, partly good luck being in the right place at the right time and partly because he really liked the artist. It made me realise that if you like something enough you should buy it, acquire it, collect it, whatever and disregard other people's opinions.