My Top Ten (4)

Painting number four in my "trying to pick ten favourite paintings" list is a small portrait that I found in Manchester art gallery when I was a teenager. I love Freud. One of my top five painters of all. Probably. I fell in love with the colours in this - the pale skin, the greys, the modesty but the stunning observation of line and tone. He's just perfect. This is very early 1950s.

The girl's expression is superb. If you cover the left hand side of her face the eye on our right is looking right at us. But cover it, and the other eye is gazing slightly off to our left, so her gaze is a bit enigmatic and lost: she's kind of looking at us and kind of not, the sort of distraction that is typical of a lot of Freud's sitters. She's very cool and contemporary in her short haircut and arty beret. A really really beautiful painting.