Rat man: the sudden death of Lucian Freud’s iconic muse and model

He was Lucian Freud’s first male nude who posed naked for nine months with a drugged rat on his thigh. Harry Mount recalls the wild, bohemian life of Raymond Jones – and secrets behind the story of that powerful, strange painting

Raymond Jones turned from a painter and decorator into an artist (unknown, via Jade Joel)

It is quite the oddest of the works by the late Lucian Freud.

Painted from 1977 to 1978 in Freud’s studio in Holland Park, west London, the picture is neatly captured by its title, Naked Man with Rat.

And now the naked man in the picture, who proudly called himself the Rat Man, has died, at 78. Freud himself died in 2011, aged 88.