Mick O'Dea RHA: portrait painter, will give a talk on Freud at Imma on 19 June "I think if Freud was gentler on the people in his portraits he would be less popular. It's because he's quite savage or unrelenting; you could say he's an anti-sentimentalist. He's following the tradition of Goya, Velasquez, Rembrandt" James Hanley RHA: painted the official portrait of An Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern "He always continued with this very pure, figurative style, so there's a feeling that there's something very basic and authentic about it . . . that he has always painted from life. He has stuck to his guns. . . There's an integrity in the making and the content."

Maeve McCarthy RHA: winner of the inaugural RHA portrait prize in 2006 and painter of Maeve Binchy portrait for the National Gallery of Ireland "You can't help but see that this is someone who's stubbornly kept at something.

He's consistently held out as a painter from life. . . When you see Freud's brushstrokes and you see the paint, you can see that he's stood in front of something and reacted to it."

Eithne Carr RHA: landscape artist and portraitist "He and David Hockney and Francis Bacon . . . they were all the same school and they were pure painters, really, and they were wonderful."

Prof Brian Maguire: painter, head of fine art at NCAD "I find Freud's work is very effective in giving you some sense of what it's like to be human, in very emotional terms."

Portraits by Eithne Carr, Maeve McCarthy, James Hanley and Mick O'Dea are on show at the RHA Annual Exhibition until 30 June 'MYmother said that my first word was 'allein', which means alone.

Leave me alone, " Lucian Freud once remarked. If this was indeed the first thing he ever said, it remains strangely appropriate for Freud's life today. The world of the renowned painter, now 84, revolves around his London studio, with its skylight, dark floorboards and paint-spattered walls.

He spends his days there, hard at work from eight in the morning to midnight, driven by an uncompromising dedication to his art. He is singular, steadfast and self-possessed . . . in his life and his painting.

"Over the last 20 years he's been recognised internationally, but he's also become even more obsessed with painting than he was when he was young, so he rarely sees anyone except the people he's actually painting and a few friends, " says Catherine Lampert, a long-time friend and curator of Lucian Freud, a major exhibition of some 50 paintings and 20 drawings and etchings from the last 60 years, which is opening at Imma in Kilmainham in June.

Partly because of his reclusive nature, Freud has become a somewhat mythologised figure. The grandson of Sigmund Freud, he is known for his is penchant for gambling, many love affairs and the 40 children or so he is rumoured to have fathered. His artistic reputation is unquestioned internationally, but particularly so in Britain, where he is roundly adulated . . . the art critic Robert Hughes has described him as a "national treasure". A painting of his, which is due to be auctioned at Christie's in London next month, is expected to fetch upwards of �5m ( 7.3m). But despite Freud's ever-growing stature, his work can still cause a stir on occasion. Most recently for his rather unflattering portrait of the Queen, which drew as much criticism as praise for its jowly, vacant, life-toughened representation of the monarch, and for his revelatory portrait of the pregnant supermodel Kate Moss, naked, splayed and vulnerable (the latter painting was bought by an anonymous bidder in 2005 for �3.9m . . .

some say the buyer may have been Moss herself). As he has said of his work: "What do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince."

This travelling exhibition is the first solo show of his work in Ireland, and will feature many of his most famous paintings alongside works that have never been seen in public and some of his newest paintings. It will be arranged thematically rather than chronologically, with a focus on paintings of people sleeping, portraits of sitters at different ages, animals, smaller paintings, etchings and fragments of works. "It's a very intimate Freud the viewers will be seeing, " says Lampert.

And while there will of course be many of his famous nudes, the exhibition also aims to reveal different aspects of his oeuvre. It will, for example, have a particular emphasis on portraits of mature men. "People think his pictures are all nudes or young women, but it's actually not either statistically true or in terms of the quality . . . a lot of his best pictures are portraits, and there are also wonderful still lifes, " Lampert notes.

Particularly interesting for an Irish audience is that the exhibition is teasing out the artist's littleknown relationship with Ireland.

In the '40s and '50s, Freud travelled frequently to Ireland, visiting Connemara and spending time in boarding houses in Dublin, where he befriended the likes of Anthony Cronin and Patrick Swift. His enduring interest in animals, horseracing and gambling has also ensured his contact with many Irish people from the horsey set, while Irish men and women have also been the subject of several portraits. His newest painting, to be exhibited for the first time at Imma, is a masterful portrait of his friend Pat Doherty, the Donegal property tycoon behind Harcourt Developments.

Figurative painting Freud's dedication to figurative painting, and to portraiture and the nude in particular, has been unwavering throughout a 60-year career, spanning a time when such an approach was not always fashionable. "I think he's really managed to renovate the genre of the figure and the portrait especially, which is quite an unusual subject today f I don't think it's a genre that people use a lot, but the portraits that Lucian does are as good as old master paintings, " says Imma director Enrique Juncosa.

"Lucian has managed to reach where he is without being fashionable; he's consistently worked and produced this body of work which is very personal. He eventually has this massive recognition, but this recognition started quite late in age."

This single-minded dedication could also be seen as being part of a rather rebellious, stubborn streak. "I would have thought that the fact that something was forbidden, or almost illegal, would make it all the more exciting, " Freud once said of his choice of figurative subject matter.

Freud's risk-taking tendencies emerged early in his life. Born into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1922, he was the son of the Sigmund Freud's youngest son, Ernest.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, however, the family moved to London. After being expelled from school as a youth (for dropping his trousers in public), he later attended the Central School of Art and then the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing. While studying at the latter, the school building burnt to the ground one night . . . Freud once recalled that he and his friend were smoking in the art room earlier that evening.

During WW2, he experienced a brief sojourn as a sailor, but was forced to return home with tonsillitis and was exempted from military service. He had his first solo show in 1944 and, after the war ended, travelled to Paris in 1946 and then to Greece. Afterwards he returned to London, where he has been based ever since.

In 1948, Freud married Kitty Garman, the daughter of sculptor Jacob Epstein, who became his muse for a time. However, their relationship soon ended and he was married again in 1953, to Caroline Blackwood. But that marriage was also doomed to fail, and ended in divorce.

Freud got to know Francis Bacon in the late '40s, although they fell out in the '70s for some unknown reason. During that post-war period, however, Bacon and Freud were working alongside the likes of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, and in retrospect these painters are often grouped together under the banner of the so-called School of London painters. While their work is noticeably distinct, they were all linked by an interest in the figure.

"I think they were considered, maybe, a little old-fashioned, " says Juncosa. "But f now everybody acknowledges how important that group of artists were."

Freud's early paintings were notable for their focus on drawing, cool colours, smooth paint and an often surrealistic juxtaposition of objects. However, by about 1950, he was becoming dissatisfied with this approach. "I got very impatient with the way I was working, and I think my admiration for Francis [Bacon] came into this. I realised that by working the way I did, I couldn't really evolve."

Gradually, his style began to take a new direction. He started to stand rather than sit when painting, stopped using sable brushes and changed to hogshair, and began creating looser, increasingly painterly works. It was in the '50s that he also started to focus primarily on portraits, self-portraits and nudes, subjects which have preoccupied him ever since. In 1972, for example, he embarked upon a series of paintings of his mother, which continued until her death in 1989.

Popularity It was in the '80s, when his work became more popular, that he started his famous large-scale nude paintings. The following decade, he began to paint the performance artist and clubgoer Leigh Bowery, known for his bizarre and outrageous costumes.

Freud was unaware that Bowery was dying of Aids at the time but, somehow, a sense of mortality creeps into these works, with the exposed humanity of Bowery, stripped of his costumes and flamboyant public image, to the fore.

Later in the 1990s, Freud turned his focus to Bowery's friend Sue Tilley, a voluptuous social services official. The crevasses, curves and sheer weightiness of her body made her a perfect subject, and these powerful paintings have become what many consider to be a "signature" Freud. While his nudes are often shocking in their raw physicality, nakedness and fleshiness, there is, as Martin Gayford notes in the Imma exhibition catalogue, an inherent tenderness in Freud's work. Indeed, his entire oeuvre is deeply intimate and personal. "Everything is autobiographical, and everything is a portrait, " he once said.

Freud rarely accepts commissions, but prefers to paint friends, family, lovers and fellow artists.

Indeed, he has even used his sons and daughters as nude models on occasion. "The more I know them, I wouldn't say it makes it easier, it makes it more potential [sic], I have to refer less and less to things that happen to be there." Rather than flatter the sitter, he distorts their proportions and exaggerates features to create undulating forms from thickly daubed paint and rich, textural surfaces. The skin takes on heightened tones, often with a slight blue or grey tinge, suggesting a hint of decay.

There is also something selfcontained about his portraits and nudes . . . an inner world within their material physicality, which gives them an animalistic quality.

"He's really aware of how they move even when they're not posing . . . how they smell, the texture of their skin or hair, the individuality of their anatomy, and he has great instincts about people f he observes them like you observe an animal, " says Lampert.

Freud can take months to complete a single painting, and as he always paints from life, the subject must come to sit for him for many sessions over a prolonged period of time. During these intimate sittings, all the conversations they have had, memories they have shared and observations Freud has made, are channelled into the painting. The result is not so much a realistic likeness as an expression of their essence. "I would wish my portraits to be of people, not like them. Not having the look of the sitter, being them."

Freud's approach to painting is a compassionate, yet uncompromising, art of seeing. His work has spanned much of the 20th century, during which he has determinedly, obsessively, forged his own path irrespective of the fashion of the moment. But despite this, he has created an unequivocally contemporary and enduring vision of humanity, seen through a unique Lucian Freudian lens. And as his latest works reveal, he shows no signs of abating. As he once said, "I want to go on until there is nothing more to see."

Lucian Freud runs at Imma from 6 June to 2 Septetember