The National Gallery’s Lucian Freud show is strangely subdued

I’ll let you in on a secret: I’m not the world’s greatest Lucian Freud fan. Girl with Roses, showing Freud’s first wife Kathleen Garman with deathly pale face and enormous staring eyes, is an undoubtedly striking image, yet it lacks the troubling edge of Dix and Schad’s portraits. While you’d expect a degree of conservatism in commissioned images of multimillionaires, Freud’s paintings of pairs of anonymous men – which the exhibition compares to Renaissance “friendship paintings” – often also lack an energising spark. Freud spent the best part of 70 years in the studio scrutinising the human figure and face – and I’ve never doubted the guy’s work ethic. Yet the truly hair-raising sense of confronting the “other”, of probing under the skin of the human condition, that you see in the work of Old Masters invoked in the show’s wall texts, such as Velasquez and Goya – and which you occasionally glimpse in the paintings of Freud’s friends Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach – is rarely evident in Freud’s work; or certainly not in the paintings in this exhibition.