Word on the street is that Lucian Freud, the grandson of Sigmund, had such an “intense sexual charisma” that he fathered 40 children.

Now you can’t believe everything you hear and 40 does seem to be an astonishingly high number but Freud has 14 confirmed children from a series of different women and no doubt there are at least a few more out there somewhere. He had a knack for swooning ladies even 50 years his junior! Below are the ways that his character was described:

• Modeling for Lucian Freud “felt like being an apple in the Garden of Eden. when it was over, I felt as if I had been cast out of Paradise.”

• “Like Svengali, he mesmerizes women into capitulation.” (Ew).

• Being with him was “like putting your finger into an electric socket and being wired up to the national grid.”

So needless to say that’s how the rumor of 40 children came about. He would never stick around to raise the children though. It was the classic Freudian slip-out-of-his-responsibilities. But the children have adjusted well - some of them becoming published novelists and poets. They have a reunion every ten years to catch up with their siblings.

Before his years of sexual prowess, Freud fled Berlin for England as the Nazi’s came to power in Germany. There he went to a series of schools but none of them seemed to stick. He was expelled from one for mooning someone and expelled from another for accidentally burning it down with a lit cigarette bud. He was a problem child to say the least. But then he got married and caused problems in that area instead. He had two divorces before he swore off marriage and from then on only had girlfriends and lovers, which didn’t complicate things any less. Every time he would have a woman model for him, they would somehow end up in bed together. An important exception to this is the Queen of England - pretty sure that was never a thing.

He was super picky about the people he would paint though because they would have to spend so much time together that he wanted to be sure that they were interesting. He famously refused to paint Princess Diana and Pope John Paul II. He also called Picasso “absolutely poisonous” (he may have had a point there), Man Ray “noisy and vulgar” and Max Ernst “stiff.” Obviously he was a tell-it-like-it-is kind of guy. He liked Kate Moss though. He had her sit for portraits and also gave her a stick-and-poke tattoo on her lower back of two birds that is estimated to be worth a million dollars.