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 Room 5 

Room 5 shows Freud in his middle years, at the height of his powers. In the late 1970s he had moved to a spacious, top-floor flat in West London. This was Freud's first proper studio; he installed a skylight in it so that he could paint indoors in much brighter daylight than before. The Large Interior W11 (after Watteau) 1981-3, painted in this brighter light, derives from a painting by the early-eighteenth century artist, Jean-Antoine Watteau. Freud began painting this on a larger scale than he had worked on before, partly because he was having trouble with his shoulder which he feared, wrongly as it turned out, would mean that he would soon become incapable of working on such a scale. Also in Room 5 is Freud's portrait of the wealthy collector Baron Thyssen, who is the Man in a Chair, 1983-5, and some of Freud's great naked portraits of around 1980, including portraits of his daughters, Rose and Esther 1980. When asked if it wasn't slightly odd to paint his grown-up daughters in this way, Freud replied 'My naked daughters have nothing to be ashamed of'.