In 20 years of working in mental health I have never seen anything as severe
Posted in General on 22. Sep, 2010
In 20 years of working in mental health, I have never seen anything as severe.”His carers are working on the basis that he has suffered amnesia or a breakdown due to a sudden trauma. It’s been such a long time, it would be difficult never to know. But if nobody can name this guy I don’t see how we can possibly find out. Every label has been removed from his clothing so we do not know where he might have come from. But those caring for the 6ft-tall virtuoso, who is in his twenties or thirties and was found on a beachside road on the Isle of Sheppey on 7 April, admitted yesterday there was a chance they would never know his real name, or where he came from.His social worker, Michael Camp, said staff were at a loss to help a patient who seemed to have gone out of his way to ensure his own anonymity.Mr Camp, based at the Medway Maritime Hospital in Gillingham, said it was a “possiblility” his client would never be identified “But I’m rather hoping it won’t be. He plays the piano for hours at a time, providing repeated renditions of his own classical compositions.
According to those who have heard him, he is talented – some say exceptionally so.The “Piano Man”, as he has become known, also draws – producing sketch after perfect sketch of himself and grand pianos.He sits, incommunicado, in a locked, hospital ward close to the M25, possibly in expectation of someone claiming him as their own or offering a clue as to his identity. And in the five weeks since he was found in north Kent, walking in darkness by the sea in dripping clothes, the slightly built man with deep brown eyes has not said a word.
But he does make beautiful music. He was found in tuxedo, white shirt and tie – from which all labels were cut His shoes were rubbed clean of identifying marks. Christie’s broke the record price for a Freud twice on 9 February this year. Naked Portrait 2002, of the pregnant model Kate Moss, sold for £3.9m, then the 1962-3 Red Haired Man on a Chair realised £4.1m.. “The pose of Bella, slightly self-conscious, almost to the point of sheltering herself, seems to suggest that, unlike her sister Esther she was less comfortable being naked under her father’s famous all-seeing eye than others.”Freud, however, saw nothing strange in using members of his family as models.
Asked whether it was odd to paint grown-up daughters this way, he said: “My naked daughters have nothing to be ashamed of.”Freud, the 82-year-old grandson of Sigmund, has become a highly collectable artist. “The naming of the sitters, something which Freud rarely does, was also a way of publicly acknowledging his children,” he added.But Bella seemed less happy than some of her siblings, the spokesman said. It comes from a series of paintings of all his daughters – Rosie Boyt, Esther Freud and Bella – in the early 1980s.A Christie’s spokesman said it was Freud’s way of getting to know them more closely after what were often years of absence while they were growing up. Bella Freud is a fashion designer of international acclaim, but in a portrait expected to make up to £2.2m at auction this summer she is seen vulnerable and naked, apparently self-conscious at being under the scrutiny of her famous father Lucian.
The portrait will go on sale at Christie’s London on 23 June. Instead, like the select band of heroic mountaineers who arrived before him, he will be able to pull up short, contemplate what he has achieved and hope that he will make it back down to tell the tale.To follow Alan Hinkes’s progress towards the summit of Kangchenjunga visit: .