Self-Portrait cover art

Self-Portrait

Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

Self-Portrait

By: Celia Paul
Narrated by: Rachel Bavidge
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £7.99

Buy Now for £7.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Shortlisted for the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2019.

I'm not a portrait painter. If I'm anything, I have always been an autobiographer.

Self-Portrait reveals a life truly lived through art. In this intimate short smemoir, Celia Paul moves effortlessly through time in words and images, folding in her past and present selves. From her move to the Slade School of Fine Art at 16, through a profound and intense affair with the older and better-known artist Lucian Freud, to the practises of her present-day studio, she meticulously assembles the surprising, beautiful, haunting scenes of a life. Paul brings to her prose the same qualities that she brings to her art: a brutal honesty, a delicate but powerful intensity and an acute eye for visual detail.

At its heart, this is a book about a young woman becoming an artist, with all the sacrifices and complications that entails. As she moves out of Freud's shadow, and navigates a path to artistic freedom, Paul's power and identity as an artist emerge from the book.

Self-Portrait is a uniquely arresting, poignant book, and a work of art and literature by a singular talent.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2019 Celia Paul (P)2022 Penguin Audio
Art Art & Literature Artists, Architects & Photographers Women Heartfelt

Listeners also enjoyed...

The Lives of Lucian Freud cover art
At the Breakfast Table cover art
Coming Undone cover art
An Equal Stillness cover art
Parisian Legacy cover art
The See-Through House cover art
We Were Young cover art
Make Brilliant Work cover art
The Water and the Wine cover art
The Girl Across the Sea cover art

Critic reviews

Captivating... Mesmerizing... Paul's powers of observation are keen and often ruthless. (Jennifer Szalai)

A poetic, sometimes painfully honest memoir. (Tim Adams)
I loved the painter Celia Paul’s memoir Self-Portrait. It’s fascinating for its account of her long-term lover Lucian Freud (he emerges as the ultimate man-baby, by turns charismatic, needy and breathtakingly selfish), but it’s also painfully honest on what it means to be a woman who puts art first, no matter what. (Olivia Laing)
All stars
Most relevant  
Wonderful to read such an unadorned raw honest account of one’s personal losses, loves, achievements, dislikes, pain, guilt and anger.
It’s can be empowering to acknowledge and admit one’s own vulnerability and a gift to then share this with others.

LOVE your unadulterated words in portraying your experiences and thoughts Celia!

Refreshingly unfiltered

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

This book just flew by in an instant! The narration was relaxing to listen too whilst always keeping you engaged. Loved it!

Engaging

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Wonderfully full of paint. You can feel the struggles with life and love from a truly painterly perspective and how that makes its way into her work is palpable. I really enjoyed this book.

Transcendent

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.