I'd come to Clarke's with Lucian every morning for breakfast.
Lucian lived a few doors away from here
and I would go in each morning to see Lucian
and then we'd both arrive here for breakfast, and read the papers.
I could take one or two phone calls
and then Lucian would go back and start painting.
The 'Afternoon in Naples' by Cézanne
Lucian first became aware of the painting
in that we saw a reproduction of it in an auction house catalogue.
It was being sold in New York and he just found it fascinating,
as he did in everything Cézanne did.
So we ripped it out of the catalogue and
we just pinned it up on the studio wall.
The studio wall here is where he would..
He would always use a palette to paint
and every time he'd mixed his paints
he would then clear it with a palette knife
and put it onto the wall;
partly just to keep the floor a little bit cleaner
as oil paint just skids everywhere,
it doesn't soak into anything.
So there was a build-up of paint over the years
years and it was almost like a cave
but it was just part of the studio.
He wasn't precious about anything …
The ripped-out page was just a spark for his imagination.
He didn't need to study it.
It just gave him the idea to then create his own drama in his painting.
Then, two or three months later,
the auction came up and Lucian was in a position to buy it.
When Lucian was making an interpretation of the Cézanne
it would sometimes be in the studio,
but brought in and then taken out again.
But it mainly lived on the second floor in his sitting room.
The 'Italian Woman' by Corot
was something that Lucian really found a fascinating portrait.
Again, that hung in the sitting room on the second floor,
and it found its place and he loved it.
He absolutely found it so sympathetic and
everything that he wanted in painting was in that work;
what it is to be human.
So he was very, very fond of the Corot
and did a number of works, again, not directly related
to the painting but the painting was in the house
and he was looking at it every day,
so it would just be there in his own painting.
Lucian always thought that art came out of art so
it was very necessary that he had these paintings in his life.
