Lucian Freud’s art, whatever its merits, contains within itself the fundamental limitation of misogyny, which is a form of partial sight, a handicap with precise consequences if you happen to be a portraitist whose subjects are often women. For example, the Celia Paul whom Freud believed he saw, whom he set out to paint[, …] was not really the person lying before him. This is not to claim that Freud’s portraits are either ‘wrong’ (whatever such a word could be mean in this context) or even bad, but simply that they are notably partial, being blind to so much; indeed, to the essential quality of the subject in question. Freud thought he saw it all, purely, clearly, without distortion—that was his fame.

But when it came to women, he did not see. Misogyny, whatever else it might be, is a form of distortion, a way of not seeing, of assuming both too much and too little.

Zadie Smith, “The Muse at Her Easel”, in Dead and Alive: Essays