For the first time in history the Royal Academy of Arts in London, in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, is bringing together Lucian Freud’s self-portraits.

The exhibition will display more than 50 paintings, prints and drawings in which this modern master of British art turned his unflinching eye firmly on himself. One of the most celebrated painters of our time, Lucian Freud is also one of very few 20th-century artists who portrayed themselves with such consistency.

Spanning nearly seven decades his self-portraits give a fascinating insight into both his psyche and his development as a painter, from his earliest portrait painted in 1939 to the final one executed 64 years later. When seen together, his portraits represent an engrossing study into the dynamic of ageing and the process of self-representation.

For Lucian Freud the act of ’looking’ was everything. This film is very much about the self, the progress of time and one man’s intense struggle with the making of making art.