Freudian analysis reveals a rather glum granny

Painting a monarch is all too often an exercise in vanity. Thousands of royal portraits are rarely more than obsequious or sentimental reflections of the subject's fame and power.

But Lucian Freud, one of Britain's best living painters, has achieved much more than that here. This is a portrait that aims at the truth behind one of the world's most famous faces.

Appearing on stamps, coins and banknotes, Queen Elizabeth II has an official image that presents a great challenge to an artist such as Freud. But it is one he has relished to produce what is arguably the best royal portrait since Goya painted Spanish kings 200 years ago. The Queen has usually been the subject of hacks producing pictures merely to raise toasts to.

Freud started the painting in March this year, studying his subject at sittings spread over many months because of the Queen's commitments. He is a painter, not a "portrait painter".

This work sits firmly in the line of Holbein's Henry VIII, and Van Dyck's Charles I.

It was a portrait that Freud contemplated painting for years. Louis XIV's famous demand was "étonne moi" ("astonish me"). We have here a regal granny figure. Freud set out to read the Queen's face and has done her proud.