What was Lucian Freud like as a father?

If there is one thing Lucian Freud had in common with conventional Jewish fathers, it was pride in his family. The greatest Anglo-Jewish artist of our times painted 10 of his children (that may be less than half of those he is rumoured to have fathered, but it’s the majority of the 14 he acknowledged), the mother with whom he reconnected after a broigus lasting decades, a stepson and at least two infant grandchildren, despite his dislike of children too small to be interesting.

Many of these family portraits will be on show at the National Portrait Gallery this spring in a fabulous retrospective which also includes charming childhood drawings that gave no indication young Lucian would grow up to be a louche, serially unfaithful, cad of a dad. They include Bella Freud in the Pluto T-shirt that came from his fashion-designer daughter asking her dad for help creating a logo. Ever the indulgent father, he also designed the book jacket for Hideous Kinky, the book Bella’s sister Esther based on their childhood in exotic but impoverished surroundings with an absent father.

“My first vivid memory is when he came to visit when I was seven, driving a big, expensive car,” Esther told me about the beginning of her relationship with Lucian after the girls returned to England from Morocco where their mother, Bernadine Coverley, had taken them to live in very early childhood. They settled at a Sussex school where Bernadine, who Lucian had avoided since the girls were born, was a dinner lady.

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“He was glamorous, elegant and from a different world,” she remembers of the increasingly present and generous father who gave her a £100 in cash for her 18th birthday: “It was more money than I had ever seen.”

By 2011, the year he died, they were close enough to be seeing each other three times a week. “We children formed a roster to make sure someone visited him every day, bringing in food he liked when he wasn’t well enough to go out, and playing records.”

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Cue the chopped liver Lucian appears to have inherited a love of from his Ashkenazi parents. Ernst and Lucie Freud fled Germany in 1933 with their three sons after a cousin was murdered outside a Berlin cafe by Nazi thugs. “There wouldn’t be tons of things in the fridge, but there would be one thing that you liked, and the fact he remembered that thing was always exciting,” Bella recounted to National Portrait Gallery curator Sarah Howgate of her early days posing for her father. “It just came from the local shop, but it was really delicious,” she says of the liver pate, the Lapsang Souchong tea and other delicacies previously unknown to girls raised on baked beans: “It was exciting sharing the things he had been brought up on, which were different from our things.”

Aged 17 when first summoned to the studio, Bella recalls an early taste of heady London nightlife following her modelling duties. “Quite often we’d work to midnight and then we’d go to a club.  Back then there was a place called the Zanzibar… so exciting. I’d never been anywhere like that.”  Even meeting celebrities almost too drunk to speak – in this case the late actor John Hurt – was thrilling to a young girl who confessed: “As I got older I was more keen to go home to bed, but in the early days it was fun.”

Bella, who left home at 16, would take Esther up on the train to see their father, and he painted them together as well as separately. Particularly precious to Esther is a 1992 depiction of her breastfeeding one of her three children. Esther and Albie  – “it’s mainly breast, arm and baby!” she says of a picture she had forgotten about for 30 years until it was shown for the first time in public at the National Gallery’s own Lucian Freud retrospective. “Like most of his pictures, it vanished into a private collection via my father’s dealer, because he always needed money.”

None of Lucian’s portraits of Esther are in the NPG exhibition, but apart from Bella, three other daughters are included – poet Annie Freud, her sister Annabel and half-sister to all of them Isabel Boyt. Although closer to his girls, Freud also painted his son Ali Boyt, stepson Kai Boyt, son Frank Paul and their mothers, Suzy Boyt and Celia Paul respectively, persuading six daughters and one son to pose naked for their dad’s interrogative gaze. First wife Kitty Garman, the daughter of Jacob Epstein, the most famous Jewish artist of his own generation, and second wife Caroline Blackwood also feature in portraits.

Depicted with more tenderness than the partners he subjected to dispassionate scrutiny was Lucian’s mother, from whom he distanced himself for decades as impossibly overbearing. He found her lifelong devotion to him “suffocating”, he confessed to artist friend Frank Auerbach, but after she fell into long-term depression and they reconciled she became one of his most regular models. Even after her death he drew the greatest fan of his work in her hospital bed.

Like a typical Jewish mother, Lucie Freud saved her son’s childhood drawings and entered them into an exhibition of children’s art; many now live in the National Portrait Gallery archive. Freud’s love of the animals and plants he first depicted in crayon never left him, and he often added little drawings to his love letters later in life. For a man who was rarely around for his children as they grew up and could be brutally callous towards their mothers, he was also capable of a tenderness, charm and playfulness which made the boy from Berlin a conundrum who morphed into a national treasure in his adopted Britain.

Lucian Freud: Drawing Into Painting is at the National Portrait Gallery until 4 May.