William Feaver, a friend and collaborator of Freud’s for 30 years, gives us a Lucian who always resisted categorisation.

... exemplary.

The critic Kenneth Tynan divided playwrights into two categories, 'smooth' and 'hairy,' and one could probably make a similar distinction among biographers. Smooth biographers offer clean narrative lines, well-underscored themes, and carrots, in the form of cliffhangers, to lure the reader onward. Their books are on best-seller lists. They’re good gifts for Dad. William Feaver, the author of The Lives of Lucian Freud — the second volume, Fame, 1968-2011, is out now — exists on the opposite extreme. There’s little smoothness in him at all. His biography is hairier than a bonobo. Feaver, a longtime art critic for The Observer in London, doesn’t provide a fixed portrait of Freud, the great realist painter, so much as he leads us into a studio filled with crusty brushes, scrapers, half-completed canvases, easels, dirty floorboards, mahlsticks and distilled turpentine, and lets us poke through the detritus as if to assemble a likeness for ourselves.

The sheer volume of material garnered and the liveliness of Freud’s speech and orbit mean that the whole project is less like traditional biography than extended reportage mixed with diary entries. This is an account of a life rather than a critical examination of one, and the art history is minimal; the paintings were Freud’s purpose so for Feaver their role is as props that framed his life rather than as objects for critical scrutiny in themselves.

One theme in this remarkable biography, based on hundreds of hours of conversation between Feaver and Freud, is the painter’s dawning realisation that, even as he opens himself up, he absolutely doesn’t want his biography to be written after all… at least not until he is safely dead.

Lucian was the id unchecked, and Feaver leaves no characteristic or behavior to the imagination.

In this second volume, which covers the years from 1968 to Freud’s death in 2011 at the age of 88, Feaver himself becomes a significant character, always (it seems) at the artist’s elbow, inserting his own first-person recollections and opinions, quoting his own reviews and articles, retailing his own conversations and impressions. Not so much apostle and amanuensis: more like a permanent shadow.

The Lives of Lucian Freud does not read like a novel, but nor does it read like a traditional biography. Feaver seems unaware of the genre’s obligation to be dull, or prurient, or both, or the biographer’s obligation to draw a moral lesson from his subject’s life.

A rich, gamey biography, then. With some extremely interesting technical information about, for instance, etching, and Freud’s use of Cremnitz white (a banned substance he bought in bulk when it was made illegal).

When the second volume of William Feaver’s fat and extremely juicy biography of Lucian Freud begins, the artist is middle-aged.

This volume will appeal to those readers more fascinated by the artistic than the social life; who want a behind-the-scenes account of Freud’s succession of gallerists (and his rows and fallings out with them), of the critical opinions of his work (and why they were wrong), of the staging of progressively more significant exhibitions.

This is a biography like no other, more or less dictated by Lucian Freud.

There are echoes here of the first volume of Feaver’s biography, which was packed with good stories about Freud’s rackety private life and rollicking friendships with fellow artists like Francis Bacon. The same elements are also present in this second volume.

Lucian Freud declared that the purpose of his art was to 'astonish, disturb, seduce, and convince,' traits also abundant in art critic Feaver’s gleaming second and final biographical volume.