‘A Ball of Mighty, Wondrous Life’ – Picturing Childhood review

Playful... detail from a portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire with her daughter, by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Photo: Chatsworth House Trust

Trust Lucian Freud to look at his own young child with the same stern eye with which he looked at his paintings of adults. The baby's head is enormous - a bulbous blast of brown, cream and gray - in his 1961 portrait of Bella Freud. In fact, it's big enough that it can loom at you through a long gallery in Chatsworth House and draw you in magnetically. to see how the ridged, wrinkled and crumpled facial features ...